


lock the gates

by reconvenings



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - No Pennywise (IT), Anal Sex, Bisexual Eddie Kaspbrak, Bottom Richie Tozier, Brief Mentions of Misogyny, Closeted Character, Comeplay, Coming Out, Dom/sub Undertones, Drug Use, Gay Richie Tozier, Hand Jobs, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Past Drug Addiction, Phone Sex, Richie Tozier's Repression Tour, Sex Toys, Stand-Up Comedy AU, Top Eddie Kaspbrak, brief mentions of homophobia, brief mentions of transphobia - Freeform, learning to love, mid-2000s to early 2010s, the dregs of Comedy Central, yes they're all comedians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:47:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 45,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25679848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconvenings/pseuds/reconvenings
Summary: He and Eddie had been fucking for eighteen months now, give or take, and Richie’s brain started to skid sideways even thinking about it. The last time was in July, when their tour dates had overlapped, because Richie’s set in Nashville ended at nine and that gave him enough time to hop in his rental and drive three hours to Memphis before Eddie closed out his tab at the stupid cowboy-themed bar he insisted on open mic-ing at.“It’s good practice,” Eddie said, because he was nothing if not a nerd who took notes while watching Don Rickles tapes.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 92
Kudos: 186





	1. Austin, Texas: 2007

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie and Eddie do some stand-up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See chapter end notes for detailed content warnings.

They were all lying, with the possible exception of Ben Hanscom, who as far as Richie could tell, really was a genial hunk of a man who smoked too much weed.

Though, he considered, the act of smoking was just like asking to be lied to. To petition the world for something different than the first thing it offered. And then, because you got it, you were lying to yourself, which meant you were also lying to 90% of the people you’d tricked into watching, who were always going to take you at face value, even when you spent your entire career begging them not to.

Eddie was also close to not lying, if only because he seemed to not know what exactly he was lying about. He had that pent-up penned-in sort of repression, liable to burst like a t-shirt cannon. Nothing short of thrilling while you were watching it rev up, egging it on, but then the t-shirt actually hit you in the face and it was the wrong size and you (you: the audience) realized you had nowhere in the closet to put it. What the fuck do I need another t-shirt for, you griped, at home with your wife. The Clippers should spend this t-shirt budget on a competent coaching strategy. Like I need to walk around advertising a 20-game loss streak.

Of course Richie wanted the t-shirt.

Eddie had a terrible ex-wife, terrible parents, and at least three different anxiety disorders, none of which were ever the premise of his jokes. Eddie’s jokes were nominally about his Starbucks order or being stuck in traffic, or, _this guy in the red shirt in the front row thinks he can fool his date with his fake fuckin’ Rolex, huh. Yeah I can fuckin’ tell. My doctor has the same watch and he lets me bribe him for extra Lexapro._ Which was only a punchline because it was not supposed to be one.

Bill, by contrast, was more like the rest of them, wearing a persona that was more mask than mirror. He had some deep childhood trauma that he never mentioned in public but that drove his entire pursuit of comedy with an obvious, cancerous single-mindedness. Richie would know this even if Bill had not drunkenly confessed as much the first night they met, because Bill was a person who was all-in on prop comedy.

Stan’s schtick was dark and provocative and more cerebral than Richie’s, but at the end of the day, they both fed the same deprived little id, hungry and menacing and too exacting by half. His audience was Richie’s frat boys all grown up, gunning for a senior analyst position and watching Patrick Bateman heft an axe with a little extra saliva pooling in their mouths. Richie still knew Stan was lying — despite his wife and his daughter and his mortgage, all of which he took seriously with a devotion verging on neurosis — because sometimes he’d tell a joke and take two beats too long to land the punchline. This terrifyingly speculative look on his face, like he was testing the runway, _oh, feel the beam yield right under this strut; look Rich, no hands!_

Richie knew in the abstract that it was hardest for Bev and Mike, though Mike, for his part, lied mostly by omission. He simply elided the parts of his being inflected too much with the fact of his Blackness — too aware of its status as commodity, as ammunition. Give them an inch, they’ll take a mile, and so on.

Mike talked, at length sometimes, about growing up in a white hick town, but he never lingered on his friends, his family, the Blackness he was surrounded by even so; the whole process had a cloistering effect for an audience who understood the former but not the latter. 

Bev had wrapped herself up in her role with a greed second only to Richie’s own. Her beautiful mouth swollen and full of it, a red outline around every “dick” and “pussy” on stage. Richie thought it was like looking into a funhouse mirror. Milli and Vanilli of the gender wars. The two of them mugging to cameras real and imagined. Why women hate sex, why men hate salad, how to give good head, how to get a girl to stop calling. Someone had to say it. Why not them?

It wasn’t a totally fair comparison, him and Bev. Like Bev had a choice. She was a thin white woman who wanted to be seen, and more audaciously, wanted to be _funny_. There was really just one way — the Richie Tozier special, the Path of Least Resistance — that she was allowed to do it. _Anything you can do, I can do hotter._

Richie was the biggest liar of them all. Firstly, because he wanted to fuck men. Secondly, because he did. Thirdly, because he spent his entire act talking about it but pretended that he didn’t.

He used to think people could tell. That he’d inhaled on the wrong side of the word “girlfriend,” that his grip during a jerkoff motion was too considerate by half. A decade-long career as a professional dissembler had disabused him of the notion completely. Everyone was an audience member, all of the time, and audiences wanted nothing more than to believe. 

“Do you believe me? You believe me, right?” Richie had been saying, over and over, since he was ten.

He was an impressions guy, at his core. The trick to impressions was not thinking too hard about them. If you thought too much, you lost the emotion, and when you lost the emotion, you lost the audience. Richie was generally anti-thinking, which he advertised as hedonism. It was a very profitable fantasy he was selling, he told both himself and his new manager. “Sure, Rich, as long as you can keep it up,” Steve said — and well, _fuck Steve_ , the only reason Steve was even there to judge him was because of Richie’s god-given talent for _keeping it up._

The other trick to impressions was practice. Richie was a hack, but he was a good one because he practiced. In front of the mirror, at the dinner table, in homeroom, on the bus, in his car, at the grocery store. He practiced so much and still his body ached with it, as if rejecting an organ transplant over months, years, days.

“I’ve done a lot of terrible things drunk,” the guy on stage was saying. “But if I ever woke up next to a man, that’d be _it_! I would check into rehab im- _me-di_ -ate-ly,” _pause, big laugh,_ “That’s my limit, that’s my line! There’s no going back from that, nuh-uh.”

Richie wasn’t quite this guy, on this stage, but maybe some other year, on some other stage, he had been, or he would be. It was hard to keep track anymore. The excuses were piling up like dirty laundry on his kitchen table.

“I told that joke in San Francisco once and a drag queen came up to me afterwards and he said,” the guy dropped into a cheap, half-remembered approximation of Divine, “ _well, if you’re looking for an intervention, then baby, I’ll be at the Marriott_ ,” _bigger pause, bigger laugh_ , “That’s when I decided to go cold turkey. Yup. That’s right, I’m six months sober now,” _applause_ , “Yeah, yeah, don’t get all sappy, ‘cause I’m thinking of quitting AA too. My sponsor’s getting real friendly lately, won’t stop calling, keeps telling me he trusts me and he’ll never leave me. I’m planning on falling off the wagon soon. Gives me some plausible deniability.” 

Richie nursed his drink and cut a glance at Ben and Beverly. Ben was clearly not paying attention. He kept glancing at the gap between his and Bev’s hands on the armrest like he was afraid he’d catch himself in the act of bridging it.

Bev was watching the stage, her brow furrowed, mouth set in a tight line. She wasn’t laughing, but Bev was always a tough sell when she wasn’t doing business, so that didn’t necessarily mean anything.

After they left, she pushed her big Jackie O frames back down from the crown of her head and said, “I think it’s lazy, and it’s damaging. There’s kids killing themselves over this shit.”

Richie pitched his empty bottle at a trash can. It bounced off the rim. Ben gave him a disapproving look, so then Richie had to go and chase after the bottle as it rolled down the street.

He fished the bottle out from where it’d gotten wedged in the mouth of a storm drain and dunked it into the trash can with a huff. When he came back, Mike had found them and was showing Ben a cowboy hat he seemed to have impulse-bought sometime in the last hour.

Bev was paying for one of those ziploc bags of cut-up fruit a few feet away. Richie approached her from the side and did a sort of crouch-lean so he could rest his chin on her shoulder. She held a piece of pineapple up in the direction of his face. He tilted his chin up and tugged it out of her fingers with his teeth. Some of the juice dribbled over his lip. It stung, sharp and quick, seeping into the tiny grooves where his chapped lips had cracked dry.

Eddie was always telling him to wear chapstick because _peeling skin is gross, Richie, it wouldn’t kill you to moisturize._ Eddie was also always staring at Richie with his brows low and furrowed whenever Richie scraped his teeth over his lips to tear off the cracked bits. “You’re disgusting,” he’d say, and then he’d pull him into a bathroom stall to bite at the raised sores on Richie’s bottom lip and lick over the tiny points of blood that oozed out. Eddie was very, very good at mixed messages, but so was Richie himself, he supposed.

Richie chewed the way his mother had taught him not to, making loud smacking sounds in Bev’s ear. 

“Beverly. Bev. Lady Beveridge,” he said, mouth full of pineapple.

She pushed him off her. “God, Richard, you’re gonna blow out my eardrum.”

Richie’s brain-to-mouth filter didn’t auto-populate with some bit about blowing other things out, and that probably meant more than he had the fortitude to admit.

He stared at the ground while he asked her, “You don’t think our shit is the same?”

She turned and gave him a searching look. That she knew what he was talking about even though he was picking up the loose thread of a conversation she had started five minutes earlier and, just, flinging it directly into the sun, was definitely indicative of something — though he couldn’t quite decide what. Richie felt a bit like he’d put himself up for excavation, in that moment, the way Bev’s flinty gaze took a melon scoop to his stomach.

He opened his mouth, placing a well-worn deflection on the tip of his tongue, but Bev shrugged and went back to examining her bag of pineapple before it could shuffle its way out.

“Yeah, Richie, I think that’s exactly right,” she replied.

* * *

Austin the first week of September was blazing. Richie had a suitcase full of oversized, billowy button-ups, as prepared for the dry heat as one could reasonably expect for a person raised in the Midwest.

But Eddie’s tight polyester polos were terrible at hiding pit stains, so during the day, he wore sleeveless tops he’d bought in packs of three at the Under Armour outlet. This nearly canceled out the good fortune of Richie’s wardrobe, as the panting induced every time he caught sight of a drop of sweat skating down one of Eddie’s triceps must have added up to at least 8 ounces of water loss, per day. Not for the first time, it occurred to him how completely messed up it was that Eddie Kaspbrak did triathlons and yet somehow, probably illegally, was still a stand-up comedian.

Eddie acting surprised when women came up to him after shows and asked to take pictures with him, squeezing their breasts up against his deltoids and laughing breathily into his hair. “You’re _so_ funny, Ed,” they said, slapping his chest without any real force. And Eddie smiling, and saying “I really appreciate you coming out,” and honest-to-god shaking their hands, and walking away.

For most of their acquaintance, Richie had found this whole performance enraging. In hindsight, this was obviously because he had wanted to have sex with Eddie. It would be a record-breaking amount of denial, even for him, to pretend otherwise.

But it also had to do with Eddie being offered something he had the luxury of turning down. Like, this guy got all this pussy served up to him on a platter, and he was what, too good for it?

At least 40% of the reason anyone ever tried to become famous was for the sex. Not that it was any better than non-famous sex, just that it was much easier to get. This was because a fan, by definition, had already determined that they liked you, which cut out about a third of the work. And they would come to you instead of you having to find them, which cut out another third. Being recognizable, even marginally, was like walking around with a classified ad hanging in front of your face. You really didn’t have to give out any part of yourself that wasn’t already out there for public consumption, and you could just take what the viewers at home were willing to offer in return.

If the kind of famous (“famous” being a flexible descriptor here — “recognizable” or even “visible” might also be enough) you were was as a touring comedian, you could either be a) in a monogamous relationship or b) celibate. Otherwise, the only way you were getting your dick wet was by fucking fans. For instance, Stan didn’t do it because he was married — real-married, not Hollywood “married,” but Mike did it, and Bill probably did it too much, and Bev did it although it wasn’t really the same at all on account of sexism, and even Ben did it, though he’d stopped recently, as if he thought Bev was going to notice and/or care.

Richie didn’t, but it wasn’t for lack of opportunity, since he too was frequently served pussy, being recognizable and, additionally, over six feet tall. He didn’t because Richie was a vegetarian in this metaphor. Or actually, pescatarian. Actually, the opposite of a pescatarian. Like he ate all kinds of meat except for fish.

And Richie still wasn’t like Eddie because he wasn’t a lifelong fucking Mormon about it. He told people who asked that he _used_ to fuck fans before he got bored of it. On the lying scale, it was only a 4, because he really had fucked some girls at his earliest shows and he really had gotten bored of it, especially after he’d lucked into a perfect lavender relationship that both he and his only-ever girlfriend had been too dense to fully appreciate. The only thing he was lying about was the fact that, occasionally, he still did fuck fans, except only a specific subset of them and he had to make sure they would sign NDAs. 

Eddie said he didn’t fuck fans either, and that he never had.

Because Richie had a terminal case of pathetic sad sack syndrome, he noticed that there were times when Eddie wouldn’t stop himself from looking, his eyelids flickering over the soft curve of a woman’s waist. Then he would breathe, hard, out of his nostrils, because he was a person composed of a stacked series of tells.

So that meant Eddie had to be utilizing Rogue levels of self-control, which made Richie feel a whole host of emotions, including but not limited to: pity, jealousy, resentment. Richie was someone whose livelihood depended on his capacity for self-control, which was unfortunate considering he only had about ten cubic centimeters of it. He’d spent a single month in New York before he vaulted over the touch barrier and suddenly became the same kind of person as the girls at Eddie’s show, sticking his front to Eddie’s side, laughing at his unfunny jokes, and making deeply transparent excuses to touch his pecs.

Eddie, who really was nebulously bisexual, since once he had mentioned an ex-girlfriend and Richie had laughed, pulled off of Eddie’s dick, said “Real girlfriend?” and Eddie looked at him strangely before echoing, “Yes Richie, real girlfriend,” and Richie hadn’t had any way to respond to that besides taking him back into his mouth and letting his brain white out the way it usually did with the vein on Eddie’s thick cock pulsing under his tongue.

He and Eddie had been fucking for eighteen months now, give or take, and Richie’s brain started to skid sideways even thinking about it. The last time was in July, when their tour dates had overlapped, because Richie’s set in Nashville ended at nine and that gave him enough time to hop in his rental and drive three hours to Memphis before Eddie closed out his tab at the stupid cowboy-themed bar he insisted on open mic-ing at.

“It’s good practice,” Eddie said, because he was nothing if not a nerd who took notes while watching Don Rickles tapes.

Eddie’s actual set was the next night, and Richie spent it swanning about the hotel room, ordering from four different barbecue restaurants and watching a Liam Neeson marathon on AMC. 

Eddie had fucked him up against the window that afternoon, Richie’s chest pressed up to the heavy yellow curtains and kneeling on the scrubby carpet to accommodate his height. (“They clean those like once a month max, Rich.” “Well, I wanna feel the ghosts of other people’s cum while you’re fucking yours into me. It’s spiritual, for me. Help me suck up all the cum thetans, Eddie.”)

Afterwards, Eddie didn’t pull out, but he did take a slim black plug out of his back pocket. (The way he had taken off his shirt but not his _pants_ before sliding into Richie’s bare body made Richie’s frontal lobe unscrew a little.) He tapped the plug against the corner of Richie’s mouth as he stroked Richie’s spent cock with his other hand, rubbing cum back into the shaft with gentle rotations of his thumb.

It was a new thing they had talked about over the phone. Richie laid out over a quilted polyester bedspread in Salem with three fingers up his ass, Eddie on the line breathing deep, coaching him through it. “How’d you like to stay full all day, Rich,” he’d said, just one line in the cascade of dirty talk that would spout unbidden from Eddie’s pert mouth as soon as anything — his own hand, Richie’s hand, Richie’s mouth, Richie’s ass — gave his dick the time of day.

The bedspread was patterned with little red-and-white lighthouses and Richie came all over it, like a summer squall.

In Memphis, Eddie murmured, “You like being all filled up right now,” low into Richie’s temple. Statement, not a question, but Richie nodded jerkily anyway. 

“You’re going to miss me warming you up from the inside.” Richie opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue a little, wiggled it like a worm in a bed of tulips. Eddie obediently placed the plug there so Richie could lick at the tip. Gummy silicone stuck gormlessly to his tongue.

“You want me to keep you stuffed up while I’m working, huh?” He pushed the plug deeper into Richie’s mouth. Richie sucked and licked at his fingertips, scraping his tongue over the blunt line of his fingernails.

He thought about Eddie on stage, sweaty and golden, hitting his marks with practiced fastidiousness. The bicep that flexed during his bit about OSHA was the same one that flexed when he held Richie’s head down into the pillow.

That was the beauty of sex. Debt-free imagination. The license to look. Because how could a person tell him he couldn’t, after he’d had their cock in his mouth?

“Keep you all warm and open for me. When I come back, I’ll fuck you all over again, just push right in, yeah?” Eddie circled his hips as he said it. Richie could feel Eddie’s cock start to stiffen up again, still inside of him, and the pressure on his shot-out nerve endings was nearly too much to bear. He whined around the fingers in his mouth and clawed desperately at the drapes, nearly pulling them open.

“Shhh, I got you,” Eddie hummed, licking into the outline of Richie’s ear. He slid the toy out of Richie’s mouth and moved both hands towards Richie’s lower back, pushing gently at his spine until Richie sunk down on all fours. He felt Eddie trace the plug in slow circles along the top line of his ass. “You’re beautiful like this, Rich,” he said quietly, calmly, warm breath embracing the back of Richie’s neck.

Richie felt shame fizz like carbonation in his wrists, his ears, his kneecaps, until Eddie began to stroke his hair and kiss his neck and Richie was swimming again in heady nothingness.

He used to fantasize about something like that as a kid, lying on his back in the grass and sinking into the dirt as if on a soft mattress, the wet loam engulfing his limbs and cradling his head. Stan would write a joke here about an early grave, but Richie had never been that morbid, even then, pressing his body into soil with a soft kiss. They’d been learning about osmosis in school, and what Richie wanted was for the earth to saturate the membrane of his skin, to set into his reedy arteries and stitch together the cell tissue threatening to vibrate out of his person. Anchor me like a golem to this earth, so I can stay and stay and stay.

Eddie pulled out all at once, like a shot, and Richie moaned at the suction-slide of it. It was noisy, air rushing out to meet the stale hotel mix and the dirty squelch of semen pleating over his hole. Richie giggled. He had a bit about girls queefing in his set just like that.

Then there was pressure over that same spot again, and then the sensation of being penetrated. Shallow this time, not the deep, aching stretch of a real live dick, _Eddie’s dick_ , with all of its heat and texture and twitchy range of movement.

On a physiological level he recognized it was a trained pleasure response, how he would start to itch and gnaw when he thought about something slotting into the pucker of his body. When he thought of it dripping warm, wet, and sticky. When he thought of it _right there!_ where all the little sensors were, where they would oh-so-generously deliver bouts of sexual gratification in undulating waves, up his sacrum, across his joints, into the endorphin sites in his pituitary gland. 

He felt the plug stretch him open along the scalloped ridges of his hole and breach neatly past the first ring of muscle. It seemed to hit a soldering stop, glued in place by the hot remnants of Eddie’s cum. Richie sighed gustily, the tail of it vocalizing into a whimper. “ _Enh_ ,” he said, intelligently.

Eddie gathered up some cum that had spilled out with two fingers and brought them up to Richie’s still-open mouth. “Mm, taste it,” he rumbled, mouthing at Richie’s spine.

Richie made an “aaaaa” sound in the back of his throat. Eddie’s slim fingers as tongue depressor.

Once, he’d told Richie he’d wanted to be a doctor. Pediatric, maybe, _‘cause I used to see a lot of doctors as a kid and I remember the good ones_. Eddie being good with kids didn’t make sense unless you really knew him, Richie thought.

He should really stop thinking about kids at a moment like this. With a man’s fingers in his mouth and semen on those fingers. 

“I really like the sounds you make, Trashmouth,” Eddie muttered, pressing what Richie dared hope was affection into the name. He placed a feathery kiss on the back of Richie’s neck and Richie made the sound again. Eddie bit him at the same spot on his neck, sharp and glancing.

At midnight, when Eddie came back, Richie was waiting on the bed, impatient and wanting. Eddie pressed him full-bodily into the sheets and fucked him again in neat relentless strokes.

* * *

On their first night in Texas, Richie had hand-delivered his STD test results to Eddie’s hotel door. Eddie, who had checked in not 20 minutes prior to this, shut the door in his face.

Richie rang the doorbell approximately seventeen more times until he opened the door again, said “You’re a degenerate fucking bridge troll, you know that?” and shoved him inside.

The STD tests were a formality by now, at least on Richie’s end. He’d stopped answering sex ads the first time he’d booked Conan, which led to a period of celibacy, followed by a renaissance of college-era dark bar bathrooms and the occasional NDA. Then he’d spent one winter hooking up with another guy on the LA circuit who hated topping; they’d really only lasted that long by the doctrine of mutually assured destruction.Then it was back to bars, plus Eddie, and then just Eddie.

By Richie’s estimation, having only one semi-regular, extremely talented sex partner was well worth the time he saved if he’d have been periodically trawling for new, disappointing dick. The effective monogamy was also useful because Eddie was quite literally anal about STD risk and Richie craved being jizzed in as frequently as he craved nicotine patches. So he did the tests like a good student, even though Eddie knew he hadn’t slept with anyone else in a year. Granted, Eddie’s own attachments were still a mystery, but Richie thought it was better for the both of them not to open up that particular line of inquiry.

Eddie made Richie sit on the bed and told him he wasn’t allowed to talk or move while he diligently hung his nerdy little Izods up in the closet. This was behavior that made about as much sense as making the bed in the morning, Richie thought, considering that they were only going to be in town until Thursday.

At some point, eyes glued to the taut stretch of Eddie’s airport slacks over his thighs, Richie began idly stroking himself. Eddie didn’t notice for three entire Izods, enough time for Richie’s cock to fill out completely, Iceman standing at attention to the rest of Richie’s Maverick slouch. When Eddie did notice, he threw a pair of socks at Richie’s head, as if the hypocritical asshole hadn’t been asking for it, bending over at every chance he got.

Richie won in the end, since he only had to wait another five minutes before Eddie was crawling up on the bed and swirling the tip of his tongue around the head.

He paused in the middle of what was shaping up to be a very tongue-heavy blowjob to reach behind Richie’s back and grab at the test results that he’d haphazardly strewn around the bed. They were crumpled and creased where Richie’s elbow and right asscheek had landed on them. Eddie, who was a deranged person, kept his mouth fitted over Richie’s dick and his free hand cupped under Richie’s balls while he scanned over the pages. 

“What the fuck, why—” Richie started, but it siphoned off into a whine, because, while reading, Eddie had removed his left hand from the underside of Richie’s balls and brought it to the business end of his dick. With an even-keeled grip, he pushed the tip into the soft inside part of his cheek. Richie could see the shape of it impressed, fondant-like, upon the reverse side of Eddie’s skin. He traced his index finger around the outline, and the corners of Eddie’s mouth folded down into a moan. So maybe Richie mewled a little, but he got the message and shut up.

Eddie set the papers aside, straightening them out as best as he could with one hand occupied, like he was approving a loan application, not deciding whether or not he was going to swallow. Then he steered Richie back into the gaping tunnel of his throat, right down the center. He sucked his cheeks in, pursing his lips, and Richie came with a shout.

The next day, in a bowling alley men’s room, Richie was crowding into his back, pressing him into the lip of the sink. He tried to make eye contact in the mirror.

“Your shit bowling is making me hard, Eds.”

“Richie,” Eddie hissed back, glaring intently at the door.

“Mm-hm, do you feel that? That’s j-uust for you,” he muttered, rubbing his crotch against Eddie’s ass and bowing his head to bite at Eddie’s shoulder. 

“Richie.”

He huffed into Eddie’s right bicep. “Relax. There’s only two stalls. Plus the guy behind me saw me go in right after you.”

“I don’t know, what if someone comes in to wash their hands?”

Sighing, Richie stepped back. Eddie caught his wrist. “Are you wearing it?” he asked. He touched Richie’s hip with two fingers, almost reverent.

Richie nodded. His throat clicked when he swallowed. It had almost been easy to forget about it, a couple of hours in. But one touch from this man and he was suddenly standing under a big neon sign that read “ANAL PLUG” with showgirl mirror lights all around it. He remembered sliding the plug in in the shower that morning, vision swimming as he imagined Eddie looking at him hungrily like this.

God, his asshole was clenching around it now, like it needed more than anything to feel something press up close against its walls. He must look dazed, stupid, eyes glazed over, cream and sugar spread thin and glossy and sweet.

Eddie pressed his fingers, firm, into the give of his pelvis. Fossil print. Memory foam. He gave Richie an appreciative once-over. “Good boy,” he said, and swept out of the room, leaving Richie to coax down his erection alone.

When Richie sat back down at the lane, they were all comparing schedules.

“Oh, Bill’s set is the same time as Eddie’s,” Bev was saying, twisting her mouth.

“Shit, Bill, this is the big one for your special, right?” said Mike.

Bill was in the middle of what was probably his big break, for as much as you could describe someone who’d written for the Harvard Lampoon as getting their big break. This meant a 42-minute primetime special and 18 minutes of network-approved commercials. Everyone was trying very hard not to reveal whatever level of professional jealousy they each had over it.

“Yeah, last show to work out the kinks in front of a big crowd. Taping’s next week at the Wilbur,” said Bill.

Richie, for his part, was secretly thankful that he hadn’t hit it big-time enough for a special, no matter how many noises Steve or Sallie Mae made about it. There were too many risk factors that came with that many middle-American eyeballs. If you asked him, Richie’s house of cards was teetering plenty already.

“Go to Bill’s,” said Eddie, who was lounging on the other side of the table. The lounging was out of character, especially for someone with the perfect posture of a short man. He looked maybe a little out of it, though he had a pleasant smile spread across his face. It wasn’t attributable to his hipster penchant for craft beer this time, because Richie had so far only seen him drink water and, memorably, a Shirley Temple. Probably he was sober buddying Stan this week. Presumably, what was happening was an expression of sexual confidence instilled by the whole bathroom episode.

Richie felt that he ought not to presume, though Eddie was making that difficult with the lazy, almost-secret smirk he was coasting over at him. _Cat, meet cream,_ Richie thought to himself, and tried to hold in a shiver. The knowledge of the plug, which he had once again shepherded into the cordoned-off part of his mind, barrelled back to the front of the queue.

He watched Eddie watch him twitch in his seat, smirk widening until it breached his right dimple.

“You’ve all seen mine. It’s just my tour set.” He’d turned away to toggle at the strings of Mike’s hoodie. Unsettlingly, Richie felt the loss of his regard with a near-visceral flare of disappointment.

“Oh, but the whole point of an Eddie Kaspbrak show is the crowd work,” said Stan. He took a big sip of his soda. “Real Sophie’s Choice here.”

“Down, boy,” said Mike. He dipped his fingers in his glass and flicked the foam from his beer at Stan, who frowned but didn’t flinch. 

“I get to see Eddie Kaspbrak’s crowd work every Thursday at trivia night,” said Bev, patting Eddie on the cheek. Eddie scowled but his nose pinked up nicely, bringing his tawny freckles out under the big fluorescent lights.

“You can all see mine on _TV_ ,” Bill said.

“But Bill, don’t you want some _professional_ opinions?” said Bev, pausing to whoop loudly when Ben hit a strike. “Artists are the best critics, you know,” she finished once she settled down. The little TV above them played an animation of bowling pins with X’es for eyes and mouths with stuck-out tongues falling forward off a cliff.

“Butt Bill,” Richie snorted. He snaked his hand out for a high five, which Stan ignored. Richie turned pleadingly to Mike, who rolled his eyes but slapped his palm nonetheless.

“That’s actually the last thing I need a week before taping,” Bill said to Bev, but he was smiling about it and patting her besottedly on the bicep. Bill shared Mike’s proclivity for sentimentality, and predictably, he had the worst tolerance of them all. This made him an exceptionally touchy drunk, which had caused Richie quite a bit of consternation in the first year or so of their friendship.

“I’d hardly call most of us artists,” said Stan, who was still studying the bowling animation like he was waiting for David Attenborough to start narrating it.

“Most of us? So who exactly in this illustrious crew is, in your esteemed opinion, monsieur, worthy of the label of artiste?” Richie knew Stan hated his Inspector Clouseau Voice, which he complained sounded exactly like both his Italian Chef and Eastern European Football Announcer.

“Bill literally draws in his act.”

“Stantoine, you wound me! You refuse to acknowledge my vision!”

“Shut the fuck up, Vincent Van No. You spent like twenty minutes talking about puke last night,” Eddie cut in.

The stupid part of Richie’s brain that puppeteered his dick lit up under the renewed attention.

“Vincent Van No?” Richie clucked at him, “Eds, I know you can do better than that.” 

“Unfortunately, being around you is creatively depleting.”

Richie laughed. “Clearly _someone_ ’s got to show up for our little Edster. He’ll go feral if he doesn’t see the big poster with his name and jersey number on it.” He bowed his head backwards to goggle across the table.

Eddie was already staring back. He raised an eyebrow. “What, Rich, you volunteering?”

They held eye contact this time. Richie’s nerve endings double-dutch swung in big, swooping arcs.

“Richie and I saw Bill’s show in July when he came to LA,” Ben said, trying to slot his big body back into one of the tiny swivel chairs attached to the table. “It was amazing. You all should definitely go. I’d love to see it again, but I also love seeing Eddie in action and Richie makes a good point. We’re all here to support each other. It’d be a shame not to show up when we can.”

Mike ticked off on his fingers. “So Richie and Ben will go to Eddie’s set and Stan, Bev, and I will catch Bill’s?”

“Not ideal, but I guess that works,” Stan said, shooting an apologetic look at Eddie, who waved him off good-naturedly.

“Wait, Ben,” Bev frowned. She had a finger pressed onto her big fold-out map of Austin. “You probably shouldn’t go to Eddie’s. Don’t you have that meeting with the Sony guy? The venue he’s at is like thirty minutes away from the restaurant.”

Ben peered over the table at the map, accidentally knocking his head into Bev’s. They both blushed, muttering apologies, and sat back down, map forgotten. Ben actually giggled. Richie made a gagging gesture that only Eddie saw. He pushed a hand into Richie’s face, knocking his glasses askew.

“It’s fine, really! I only have about ten minutes of material and I’ll have to spend the rest of my time heckling drunk coeds,” Eddie said, “Richie will be there. The rest of you can buy me drinks tonight.”

“If you’re sure,” Ben said, glancing at Eddie, and then Richie.

If he wasn’t halfway blazed all the time, Ben would probably have figured them out by now, being that he was the least emotionally stunted of all of Richie’s arrested development quasi-celebrity friends. Hell, maybe he _did_ know, really had unlocked the new plane of perception he and Mike were always yammering on about on their bimonthly acid trips. Richie went along with them about once a year, because he was both a well-known optimist and a slightly-less-well-known masochist. Every single time, he ended up in a paranoia-soaked breakdown on a Griffith Observatory terrace.

Mike said, “Richie, it’s not going to work until you believe it will,” which was absolute bullshit, because Richie fucking believed it, okay? His serotonin receptors were misaligned, was all, among other ways in which he’d been wired wrong from the jump.

“If you get into a bad trip, you have to accept it. It’s called radical honesty, bro,” Ben said, tapping twice on Richie’s sternum, “You can’t get out until you let yourself in.”

Would it be so bad, if Ben knew? Ben had an older brother who lived with his _partner_ in Provo. _Provo_ , and Richie lived in _Los Angeles_. He imagined taking Eddie skiing, buying him a hot chocolate and licking his tongue when he burned it, putting a down payment on a two-bedroom house in the woods. Richie was scrambling in the vestibule, that much was clear.

Would it be so hard, if any of them knew? He was here, surrounded by all of these lying asswipes, and you think he’d be brave or even reckless for once in his life. That was the point of having friends, right? Especially friends who’d picked the same fucked-up coping mechanism as you. It was a support group, really. _Hi, my name is Richie and I’m a comedian_.

Richie readjusted his glasses, face suddenly hot.

“Yeah, I told his mom I’d keep an eye on him when I left her room last night,” Richie replied, not looking at either of them, “She told me he still wets the bed, poor thing.” He paused. “Like mother, like son, I guess.”

Ben laughed, Stan hit him with a crumpled-up napkin, and Eddie threatened to throw a bowling ball at his head.

* * *

It was fear, you know, the root of all that lying. Fear, and a scrabbling grasp for control.

It was like this: When you were in the shower, replaying your end of some failed conversation from the day before, wishing you’d have said it this way, no, that way — _that_ would have been so much smarter, clearer, snappier, cleaner. _This, right now,_ was the real you, not the hack who told Emily her necklace was nice and then panicked and ignored her for the rest of Jason’s birthday party. Now imagine getting paid to do that. Imagine that the entire thrust of your calling was to re-litigate your delivery, revise your tics, night after night recalibrate the push and pull and stretch of your mouth and your eyes and your hands. Stand-up was the most selfish of the performing arts. This crackling desire to be seen, but only on your own terms.

A comic’s worst nightmare was being misunderstood. Which was deeply laughable, because wasn’t that the baseline human condition, being misunderstood? That the tragedy of being alive was that you were alone in your aliveness. You could beg and beg to be subsumed and spat out, suddenly legible to the world, but it would always, always be too much to ask for.

At one point, he’d dated a feminist who was always gushing about political lesbianism and reading Adrienne Rich poems out loud before bed, which had seemed very close to romance at the time. They would have terrible rows about Richie’s routine until she flatly refused to attend his shows, but in bed she thanked him sweetly when they stuck to hand stuff. So many of her friends were dating progressive, intellectual men who pressured them for sex, were sometimes forceful, even violent about it, you see, and for all of Richie’s _many_ flaws (certainly not progressive, clearly not intellectual, not to mention sloppy, inattentive, unserious, equivocating), at least he was kind and respectful here, at night, under the covers.

Richie knew enough at the time to feel about 12% bad about the unearned praise, like he was cheating the system somehow, but it wasn’t like he was brand-new to the concept, having copied off Greg Cole’s homework in first period for three years straight, and anyway eventually Sandy had _actually_ cheated on him, so he figured it was all a wash.

He’d run into her once in Oak Park, during his Craigslist period. He’d been carrying a set of speakers that he later found out blew out at around 200 Hz. They hadn’t been worth trekking out to the suburbs for, especially considering that the guy selling them hadn’t warned Richie off before coming in his mouth about three minutes in — blew out early too, and that should have been a sign. It really was a tremendously bad deal. That was the substral tradeoff to hooking up with other closeted guys, all so tightly wound up that they were anxious to come and did so with little grace: Speed and discretion for speed and discretion. Thankfully he’d made the guy put on a condom, even though he’d whined about it, like having a wife and two kids meant he was immune to STDs. Richie had had a case of gonorrhea once a couple years back and was at the very least vigilant about all that.

Sandy was walking a little white terrier, arm in arm with an older woman wearing rimless glasses and a shockingly violet mohair sweater. It was a brown Asian woman, which meant she wasn’t the woman Sandy had left him for, and at least there was some dignity left in that.

On instinct, though he realized afterwards that it had probably been an embarrassing tell, he scrubbed a palm over his mouth before he smiled over at them.

They made small talk about the weather, Chicago, Richie’s career, Sandy’s jewelry line, the little dog. Near the end, Sandy tried to ask about the thing they were all avoiding. “Richie, did you,” she started, then seemed to think better of it. Finally she landed on, “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” and wasn’t that as condescending as ever.

He ended up giving the speakers to a neighbor when he moved out to LA a couple months after.

On stage in Austin, Eddie was wrapping the microphone cord around his wrist. Neat, taut lines over his skin, glowing spick and shine under the stage lights. His broad Staten Island syllables pinballing around the room. You could kind of see his nipples poking out against his tight striped polo, which was just. Ridiculously slutty. 

“I know you all barely know how to read,” _pacing to the other side of the stage_ , “Yeah, okay, tell me why else you’d be at a comedy festival. Yeah, see,” _broad sweep of the arm,_ “I didn’t think so. So I know you can’t read.”

Someone yelled obnoxiously towards the stage, incoherent from where Richie was seated.

“Okay, fuck you, let me just get through the first five minutes. Jesus, this isn’t Mrs. Bumblecunt’s first-grade class, you moronic taint whistle. You can just go take a shit, you don’t have to be loud about it,” _taint whistle! bumblecunt!_ “Can’t read, don’t read, I don’t give a shit. The point is: No one here fuckin’ reads.”

“Alright, you want me to _roast_ you, is that it? You’re lucky, you know that? Normally, I don’t negotiate with terrorists but I’m on a time limit today. So,” _pause, sip of water, eyes blazing into the middle distance,_ “You look like a Mormon factory owner. You look like Fozzie the Bear fucked Donald Rumsfeld. You look like a Cabbage Patch Kid under investigation for charity fraud.”

Look at him, Richie wanted to say, leaning over breathlessly toward the couple clapping idiotically in front of him. He’s gonna fuck me tonight. He looks like he’d show up early for his taping of American Ninja Warrior. _I_ look like someone’s claymation of Chris D’Elia, and he’s gonna _fuck_ me tonight. 

“Yeah, that’s for you, Elder Walton,” Eddie said, middle finger raised. Richie felt delirious. He laughed so hard he nearly pissed himself.

It was true, not speculation, but they didn’t fuck right away either. After Eddie’s set, they went to Zilker Park and ate fish tacos under the waning September sun. Richie chugged a whole liter of water. (Eddie had given him a pamphlet about anal sex the first time they’d fucked and “drink lots of fluids for digestive health” was on page two.) He rolled once or twice onto the planes of his ass, testing the give of the plug, Eddie watching him weightily and biting his lip. Richie thought he might go supernova, right there above the Colorado River.

Finally, they retired to Eddie’s hotel room. Richie had to piss, owing to all the water. Eddie was fiddling with the radio when he emerged from the bathroom.

Richie announced that he’d cleared the pipes. 

“It’s-a-me, Luigi!” he crowed. He’d taken off his pants and belt, but kept on his boxers and his t-shirt, which read “19th Annual Spokane Fun Run” and had a drawing of Bigfoot on it, because Eddie usually wanted a hint of a striptease before they got down to business.

“Are you a literal idiot,” Eddie had a vocal tic that was the opposite of uptalking. His questions always sounded like scolds. “Everyone knows that’s Mario.”

“No, because you’re obviously Mario, and I don’t know Luigi’s catchphrase.”

“That’s disgusting Richie, they’re brothers.”

“What, you don’t like a little incest? I thought you’d be into it, seeing as I’m fucking your mom.”

Eddie had the gall to look affronted, like he wasn’t the one fine-tuning the dial to NPR after Richie had told him to set the mood.

Richie stalked towards him, eyes narrowing. Eddie bristled and puffed out his chest.

They were facing each other now. In the movie about his life — god, he hoped nothing like that ever got greenlit, what kind of hell-bound demon person would pay to see _Brokeback UCB_ — this would be the moment before the big, sexy kiss. Not the cheesy romantic climactic one with the rotating dolly, since, you know, they _were_ in a Best Western, but the one where the narrative dam holding back all the sexual tension finally breaks. The audience gets wet, literally, metaphorically.

Richie said, “I should have guessed that Michelle Norris makes you hot.”

“Fuck all the way off,” Eddie grumbled and shrugged, “You took forever. And _Car Talk_ ’s on, not _All Things Considered_.”

“Ohhh, of course it’s _Car Talk_ for you.” Richie flicked Eddie on the forehead. “You wanna get clicked? You trying to get clacked?”

“I’ll clack you,” Eddie said. He caught Richie’s wrist when he tried to change the dial.

Richie laughed, high and bright. “It’s what I’m here for.”

“Don’t change it now, they’re about to announce the Puzzler,” Eddie complained. They started arm-wrestling, in the loose and uncoordinated way that Richie understood was Eddie flirting. Richie always won, not because he was stronger but because he played dirty and would tickle the side of Eddie’s hand.

“Just look it up later, Eds.” He turned the dial a few clicks until something with instrumentation started streaming out.

“We’re not having sex to Fergie,” said Eddie. He swatted Richie’s hand aside and turned off the radio completely.

Without its low static thrum, it was hard to focus on anything but Eddie’s face in front of him, lined and thoughtful. He watched him breathe in deep through his nose. They were close enough that Richie thought he might be able to count all of Eddie’s new freckles.

The time before the last time that they’d had sex, Richie had very stupidly played _How It Feels To Be Something On_ out of his laptop speakers and nearly cried when Eddie hit his prostate during the first verse of “Every Shining Time You Arrive.” So maybe it was better to go into this rawdogging their eardrums.

Eddie slid Richie’s glasses off of the bridge of his nose. He folded the arms neatly and set the frames onto the chipped top of the bedside table. The room tone buzzed loudly in Richie’s ears.

Eddie’s eyes raked over him.

The Earth spun resplendently on its axis.

Richie backed out for the second time in a row.

“Oh you know Fergie? That’s impressive, Eds, surprisingly hip of you.”

Eddie rolled his eyes. “Yeah, the new DJ at Gotham’s fucking like, 12. He thinks Justin Timberlake is ‘post-ironic,’” he said, with the most aggressive set of air quotes Richie had ever seen. 

“Oh he cues you in with Big Girls Don’t Cry, doesn’t he?”

Eddie glared at him, which Richie took as a yes.

He grinned and then took his shirt off, which made Eddie glare some more.

“C’mon man, clog me up,” he said.

“I’m going to murder you.”

“Yeah, with your dick,” Richie said dreamily.

Eddie growled. “I’m going to chop you up and throw you into the river.”

“Yup, the river of your jizz.”

“Oh my god, do you ever turn off.”

Richie pulled down his boxers. “Nope,” he said, popping the _p_. “Kinda do the exact opposite when you’re around, hot stuff.”

His dick bobbed and slapped against his stomach as it separated from the elastic waistband. Eddie stared at it and sucked in his lower lip.

Richie would have preened, but he’d found that sexual tension between the two of them was multiplicative, so mostly he just got impossibly harder.

“C’mon Eds, I’ve had this plug up my ass for like six hours,” he griped, “I haven’t even been able to take a shit.”

“Richie, I swear to god, if you shit on my dick-”

“Then it’ll be your fault for waiting too long to fuck me.”

“Be a little less desperate, won’t you?” And then Eddie was tugging him forward onto the bed and licking over the seam of his lips. Richie crawled over his body until he was pitched tight against the line of Eddie’s whole chest, hands cradling the back of his head and knees squeezing his thighs.

They made out for what felt like ages. Eddie’s tongue swirled around his and thrusted in and out of Richie’s mouth a few times in little flicks. Richie sucked at his lower lip and hummed lowly from the back of his throat. He felt every other thought he’d had that day unhitch and float away, replaced only by _Eddie_ , _Eddie_ , _Eddie_.

Eddie’s hands were rubbing greedily over and over Richie’s skin, sweeping across his shoulders, skimming up his stomach, clutching at the meat of his ass. He took hold of the crease where his cheeks met his thighs and then pushed up on his side, rolling Richie with him. Richie landed on his back and spread his legs without thinking.

“God, Rich, you’re such a slut,” Eddie breathed.

“Can’t help it.”

“Fuck, baby.” Eddie lowered his hand to the vee of Richie’s legs and fanned his fingers out wide across his taint. The plug bobbed slightly further into his hole when Eddie pushed his palm down on it.

Richie winced and ground his teeth. “Hnngh,” he said.

“It’s not enough, is it? You need my cock.”

Richie nodded his head violently, stuttering it against the headboard. Eddie looked down at him, faux-beseechingly, his big eyes wide and gleaming. The thin gold chain he always wore dangled prettily over Richie’s mouth. Richie tapped at it like it was a baby mobile. He wanted to trap it between his teeth while Eddie pinned him down by the roots of his hair and fucked him slow and deep.

“Eddie, can I ask you a question?” he breathed out.

“Anything,” Eddie said. His hair was flopping over his forehead and he was so cute, Richie had always thought he was so cute.

He mustered as high of a falsetto as he could in the moment, all the saliva having drained out of his throat. “Wanna go down like London?” his voice creaked.

Eddie swatted the head of Richie’s dick and made a face, but he put his mouth over it anyways.

Eddie sucked cock like he did most things, preachy and a little mean. He didn’t like to deep-throat but he moved from testicles-shaft-head in a steady, considered routine and he only gave eye contact when he knew Richie was about to come. Sometimes he would pull off right before and say that Richie was only allowed to come on his cock.

This time, he didn’t blow Richie for long. He licked a cooling stroke under Richie’s balls and then put his tongue on the base of the plug. He circled it once, twice, then placed it between two fingers and dragged it out slowly, like a Jenga block, Richie thought ridiculously. He stared straight into Richie’s eyes the whole time.

See? Mean.

Eddie placed the flat of his tongue back on his hole and lapped at it. He fucked it shallowly in and out of Richie’s hole. Richie was shaking minutely and exhaling in pinched _unh, unh, unh_ sounds. The gold necklace dangled over Richie’s dick, teasing the tip of it. He combed his hands through Eddie’s hair so that he wouldn’t be tempted to touch it.

Eddie came up for air and kissed him hard on the lips.

“You want me to fuck you, Rich?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Richie pleaded.

The great thing about the plug was that it removed the need for prep, even though Eddie was an asshole who insisted that he just loved foreplay. Thankfully, the rimming counted for enough, so he slicked himself up with lube and pushed in without further preamble. He clasped a hand to Richie’s chest for leverage and began to move, grinding in thick and steady in time with Richie’s choked grunts.

“You feel so good, Eds, you make me feel so good, I feel so full,” Richie blabbered. 

“Nothing like the plug, right?”

“God, no. Your dick is so much better. It fits me perfectly. You move so perfectly, oh fuck—” he cursed with a drawn-out moan.

There really was nothing at all like the feeling of a penis pressing against a prostate — neither fingers nor toys could pierce the spot with as much depth or breadth or force. The first time Richie had experienced it, when he was 25 and working as a cater-waiter, he’d orgasmed much faster and harder than he’d expected and had to work the rest of the event with a conspicuous stain on his tie.

Now, Eddie hit it over and over with a punishing, practiced accuracy.

Richie chanted, “Right there, right there, right there,” and Eddie sped up his pace, until Richie, loose-limbed, felt his body bounce lightly atop the mattress. Sweat rolled off Eddie’s shoulders and dripped over Richie’s face. He stuck his tongue out to catch it. 

“You’re so loud, Rich,” Eddie said, and slapped a hand over Richie’s mouth. The other one moved to squeeze his hip. Richie tongued at the hand and Eddie laughed.

It was like his cart was climbing the track of a 300-foot tall roller coaster. Adrenaline building in his gut, reaching and reaching, impossibly high. Richie craned his neck forward in a desperate bid to catch a glimpse of Eddie’s hips pistoning in and out of the tight clutch of his body.

“You like watching, huh? Watching me fuck your ass hard and open? That’s good, that’s so sexy. I wanna watch you too,” Eddie said, voice low and wrecked.

“I want to watch you come. Can you do that for me?”

Richie nodded frantically. 

“Rich, can you come?” He lifted his hand off of Richie’s mouth and cupped it under his lips. Richie spit in it. 

“Touch me, touch me, please,” he whimpered.

Eddie, who was a genius, acquiesced. He gripped the base of Richie’s cock and began to stroke in time with his thrusts. Up and in. Down and out.

“Fuck,” he said, “You had that plug in all day and your ass is still so tight. It’s so hot. How much you like it. I know you want it all the time, let me give it to you. Let me help you come. Let me fill you up, fuck, Richie. _Baby._ ”

“Eddie, Eddie, fuck me, oh my god, harder, harder, more—”

Suddenly, Richie felt his muscles seize up and his head fill with white noise. It drained down his brain stem and his spine, mixing with the heat that had pooled and then overflowed in his lower gut. Distantly, he had heard himself shout Eddie’s name.

When he opened his eyes, there were translucent lines of cum on their chests. Eddie lowered himself down and closer so that they almost stuck together. He was still fucking into him, and it nearly burned, the pressure around Richie's groin halfway to too much post-surge.

Eddie panted half-sentences into Richie’s ear. “Beautiful, that was, you looked.”

“Please, I need more, please, fill me up,” Richie whispered, his lips teetering against Eddie’s cheek.

Eddie kissed him again, pressing their mouths together and opening Richie’s mouth with his tongue. Richie couldn’t do much except gape it open and let Eddie lick over his tongue, teeth, the roof of his mouth. His thrusts grew jerky and erratic, bottoming out arrhythmically, and finally he came deep into Richie’s ass with a low, extended groan.

Richie felt the wet warmth sink and slide out of his body as Eddie pulled out. He kissed him once more on the lips before collapsing at Richie’s side, quick and firm, like a benediction.

* * *

They didn’t cuddle, usually. The first time they’d had sex was in a scuzzy dressing room at a cabaret bar in St. Mark’s Place — “dressing room” being extremely generous nomenclature considering that it was the size of a broom closet and next to a generator. Afterwards, Richie had tried to fist-bump him. Eddie had shoved his cum-covered hand into the side of Richie’s face, and not even in an intentionally sexy way.

That had been four years into knowing each other, and, generously speaking, only six months into acknowledging that they were friends and not simply vaguely antagonistic acquaintances.

The sex had actually been rather generative for their friendship, now that he thought about it, as, with it, Eddie had become circumstantially privy to Richie’s big secret and there was a level of trust inherent to that.

Also, Richie had stopped calling him “an obsessive-compulsive wet blanket,” which he had been doing whenever he was afraid Eddie had caught him staring. This change had made conversations between them significantly less combative.

So now they could sit up in bed and shoot the shit. Which was the cool thing about being friends with the guy you were fucking.

“You ever feel bad about the kind of shit we say?” Richie was propped up against the headboard, three pillows cushioned behind him — Eddie only ever used one, and the flattest one at that, because he was approximately sixty years old and had standing appointments with a chiropractor.

There was currently about a foot of mattress space between them, which Richie considered to be a serviceable amount of no homo distance.

Eddie hadn’t even reached over to check his watch yet, which meant he was planning to let Richie hang out for a while. He had his eyes closed and an arm thrown up against his brow, because he was kind of a sleepy orgasmer. Richie always knew he was close when his rapid-fire dirty talk started to crumble into Nature Valley sweet nothings, motormouth rolling into a California stop. Sometimes it messed a bit with their whole toppy top-needy bottom dynamic, but Richie mostly liked it. It was nice to see this indisputable evidence that Eddie, too, had been well-fucked and taken care of. 

“What shit? I say a lot of shit. We talk shit for a living.”

“You know, like ‘fuck you and fuck your mom’ shit.”

“That second part’s just you.” He raised his hand off his brow and flicked his middle finger up, angling it towards Richie’s voice. Richie felt his asshole flex, like an inverse kegel. God, he was so easy.

“Come off it, you told a guy to finger a jellyfish today!” he said, “Which was brilliant, by the way, much bluer than you usually go.”

“Ugh, don’t remind me. You’re rubbing off on me. It’s fucking with my act.”

He paused. Richie watched him realize. 

Eddie groaned. “Okay, don’t look so pleased.”

“You’re not even looking over here,” Richie said, not even trying to scrub the glee from his voice. His grin stretched so wide, his cheeks were practically vibrating.

“Three Mississippi — I’m timing how long you can resist — five Mississi–“

“Unh, unh!” Richie yelped, bridging the gap between them and double-knocking his crotch into Eddie’s hip. This was a performance he’d once perfected in his 14th-billed role as Moose in the direct-to-DVD classic _American Pie Presents: Memorial Day Weekend._ “You betcha I’m rubbing off on you!” he cackled.

Suddenly he remembered that Eddie had called him once to inform him that he’d bought the movie on his hotel TV and was jerking off to Moose’s sex scene. They’d had a very spirited roleplay session over the phone then, with Richie reprising his role opposite Eddie as a virginal flautist.

Thinking about that obviously got him hot, so he started grinding against Eddie’s hip.

“What’s this about, Richie?”

“What’s it feel like it’s about?” he groaned. He dipped forward into the negative space between Eddie’s neck and shoulder. Richie’s forehead came to rest judiciously on Eddie’s goddamned fucking geometric jaw.

“Not _this_ ,” Eddie sighed. Richie could practically hear him roll his eyes, but he was placing a steadying hand on Richie’s ass as he said it. “What you just said, about our acts or whatever.” The hand circled Richie’s waist and tugged him closer. He squeezed once, tight and hard, dragging his pace down to a slow churn.

“Nnngh, I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Richie whined. “I think I can get it up again, c’mon.” He exhaled into Eddie’s ear, tonguing his earlobe.

“Oh, well, I - um, I probably can’t, Rich, sorry -”

“It’s fine, it’s fine, just let me -”

“Rich, Richie, slow down, I’ll blow you in a second, okay? Just hang on, tell me what you wanted to say earlier.”

He spread his hand over Richie’s dick and pressed down, trying to still him. Richie hissed.

“Fine, fine. I meant,” he took a breath. “Can you take your hand off first? That’s not helping.”

Eddie retracted his wrist. It floated at Richie’s waist awkwardly. Then he raised it to Richie’s temple and started to tuck a lock of hair behind his ear. Richie shook his head away frantically. “Don’t do that either.”

“Okay,” said Eddie, dropping his hand. He rolled back so there was space between them again.

“Yeah, I feel bad,” he said finally, “This industry is disgusting. Every part of it. I think I might retire.”

“What? What are you going to do?”

Eddie snorted. “I don’t know, probably go to therapy. Rehab again, while I’m at it.”

Richie was quiet, thinking about the Vicodin on the bathroom counter. He remembered also the lounging at the bowling alley and the third-to-last time that they had had sex, during which Eddie had not been able to get it up despite having consistently fucked Richie like a roided-up Energizer bunny for a year and some change. Eddie had mumbled something about a long flight in coach when Richie asked him about it and then proceeded to finger Richie furiously for forty minutes, pulling out and making him suck on them whenever Richie got close. By the end, he’d genuinely forgotten about spending the first half of the night trying to coax Eddie to hardness, seeping in silent distress over his cellulite and his receding hairline and the moles on his lower back.

“I’d prefer to wash out by choice,” Eddie said now, gently, like he was trying not to spook him.

“A stand-up comedian who believes in dignity? How quaint,” Richie scoffed.

“Yeah, caring about what other people think, wonder where I’ve heard that before,” Eddie replied unkindly. 

“That’s the job description.”

“Is it, though?” Eddie huffed. He paused, then said carefully, “Richie, what did you really mean by that, earlier? I can’t - we shouldn’t keep tiptoeing around it.” 

Richie turned his face into the pillow. “I’m not — well I don’t know if I want to call myself anything, but,” he sucked in a breath and tried again, “Look, obviously, I like you, I-I like doing this with you–”

“Oh, now you’re shy about it?” Eddie cut him off, something bitter in his tone that Richie didn’t quite recognize.

Richie stiffened.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have – keep going, Rich.”

“I like when we fuck, but I don’t know, I try not to think about it, right?” 

“You don’t think about – Jesus, Rich,” Eddie sighed, “How can you even do that?”

He felt chilly and exposed, lying bare-assed on top of the covers like this. He didn’t say anything back.

“Fine, I guess you’re definitely fucking braindead when you beg me to stuff your ass.”

He was clearly getting angry, the way he got when he’d only eaten salads all day, irritable and hungry. _For what?_ Richie thought, _Don’t you like it better this way?_

“You wouldn’t understand, man,” Richie said out loud.

“What the shit? I wouldn’t understand? We have the same fucking job, dickhead. We know the same fucking people. We go to the same — fuck! — the same fucking places.”

Richie still had his face mashed into the pillow, fingers bunched tight on the pillowcase. He heard Eddie scramble up and off of the bed, like he’d finally realized where he was and needed to put as much space between himself and all of Richie’s fucking damage as he could.

Richie sat up too and turned his body to face him, even though his eyes were coated in a film of tears and he couldn’t see past his forearm anyway. 

“Well it’s clearly different! You never talk about – about any of it.” Oh, he was nearly yelling now. They needed to quiet down before someone heard. Fuck, how thin were the walls?

Eddie had his back against the wall, head tipped toward the ceiling. He was still shirtless, but at some point he must have pulled on his boxer briefs. They cut dark lines into the top of his thighs.

“Yeah, cause I don’t need a limp-dicked cover story to keep my ballsack from falling off.” 

“Don’t act like you’re on higher ground.”

“Well I fucking am, aren’t I? Or have you actually never said that your girlfriend’s dry cunt is giving you oral thrush?”

“Oh were you waving around a rainbow flag today, or?”

Just because I’m not out doesn’t mean I don’t know I’m a fucking _queer_ ,” he spat out. “Do you, Richie?”

Eddie hadn’t moved any closer but he might as well have, looming and thundering over Richie’s entire psyche. White hot anger surged off of him like a high tide, threatening to erase their carefully-drawn lines in the sand.

“I bet you can’t even look in the mirror and say you like men,” Eddie said, fastballing the words out. They hit Richie in the throat. Richie shrugged and squeezed his eyes shut. Eddie was the competitive one, not him.

He took a shaking, wheezing breath. “You don’t have to say it like – That’s a slur, you know that.”

“What, queer? How 'bout faggot? Gaylord? Flamer? Fairy? Homo?”

“What the hell, Eddie,” Richie gasped. He shoved the heels of his hands into his eyes to stop his disloyal tear ducts from leaking any further. “That’s so fucked up. Why would you-"

“You’ll call imaginary women bitches and cunts but you won’t call yourself a homo? Pathetic, Rich, even for you.”

Richie gritted his teeth and hissed through the gaps, “You fucking - you have this asexual gremlin persona and you turn it off so fast and I never - fuck!”

“How is this about me! You’re the one who brought it up!” 

“Yeah, and then you made me talk about it. I don’t –” He clenched his jaw so as not to scream. “Fuck off. It’s not like anything you say is ever real.”

“Me?” Eddie threw his hands up. “Like I said, I’m not the one making up fake girlfriends and fake cumming on their fake fucking tits.” He slung his forearm across his brow and slunk down onto the floor. “So that’s it. You think everyone else is in denial too. That’s how you rationalize it. You ever think how self-centered you sound?”

Richie blinked, five, six, seven times in rapid succession. He wanted to punch something. He wanted to cry. He crushed his hands into tight fists and dug his nails into his palms so that he wouldn’t. “I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing anymore,” he said, as calm, as measured, as sensible as he could.

Eddie frowned, like he didn’t understand.

He stood up. He walked to the bedside table and picked up his watch.

“I think you should go, man,” he said, not looking at Richie.

“Yeah, me too.” Richie climbed out of bed, causing the covers to crumple and fall to the floor. He didn’t bother to pick them up.

He stomped into the bathroom and threw on his clothes as fast as he could, stuffing his boxers into the pocket of his cargo shorts. Eddie appeared a few feet away and wordlessly passed him his glasses. Richie shoved them over his face. They were already smudged with Eddie’s fingerprints. God, he couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

He brushed past him and stomped some more to the door. He could feel Eddie scorching at him from behind.

“Next time you’re drugged up, don’t even think about touching my dick,” Richie said at the doorway, and slammed it.

* * *

In his own room that night, Richie put on “Days Were Golden” and cried into the hotel pillows, gasping and dry.

When he was younger — a sixth-grader, a tenth-grader, a college dropout, a Chicago Reader Ten Young Comics To Watch — there had been no more taunting rejoinder than the specter of getting fucked. He thought it had probably imprinted deep into the recesses of his brain, yelling “I fucked your mom” for the first time at Patrick Hockstetter in the parking lot after summer school let out, the way Patrick had sputtered and turned red-faced and chased him like he always did before they got older and learned to express disgust through distance and studious refusal. Richie had actually gotten away that time and so he remembered catching tremulous breaths behind the Circle K, thrilling under the same kind of hot rush he discovered in grade school when he refused to share his french fries with Lisa A., no matter how much she told him pretty please.

The next morning, Sam Chacowicz, who everyone wanted to be friends with because he was the first kid in town with an NES, gave him a high-five and invited him over to play Donkey Kong Jr. After class, Patrick punched him hard in the stomach like he always did, but this time it was worth it because afterwards Sam pedaled up to Richie on his bike and said “I bet his mom’s pussy stinks.”

Richie Tozier, 11, awash in newfound power. He stayed up late more nights than not, when his parents weren’t home and Mrs. Emerson from down the street was “babysitting” (passed out with a bottle of Scotch upstairs), watching movies with names like _Screwballs_ , _Hardbodies 2_ , and _Teen Sexcapades_. He memorized the lines and parroted them back in the cafeteria, where Sam and his friends huddled around and laughed. He liked how they sounded, compared to his quiet house where his voice was too big and his arms were too long, windmilling so fast that they knocked over vases and hard-earned vacation time, his dad stumbling out of the study, rubbing circles into the sides of his brow, saying “Mags, Mags, can I just get ten minutes of peace? Is it too much to ask?” so that Richie’s mother would shoo him outdoors onto the leafy Evanston sidewalks, Richie climbing up trees and smushing his face into the branches and hollering every curse word he could think of.

When he was 13, he learned what it really, truly meant: to fuck, to be fucked. “Patrick likes to take it up the ass” he said, just like he’d heard on TV. Patrick couldn’t wait until after school to give him a black eye, so both of them got sent to the principal’s office. Afterwards, Sam stopped hanging out with him because his older brother said Richie was a “liability” and “annoying as shit,” and besides, he always hogged the chip bowl when he came over.

At 14, 15, 16, he studied the nape of Connor’s neck in English class and Kenny’s bright smile at the movie theater and Peter’s broad chest at Sunday school. Someone wrote “Itchy Tozier likes to take it up the ass” in the boys’ bathroom and that was the first time he really thought about it. He tried it that night in his bed and found it unpleasant, but he’d used to hate cigarettes, too, and now he smoked them with Cissy Clark behind the dumpsters before fifth period. Cissy said her first time had hurt but now she liked it, so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

Desire had blossomed inside of him like mold in a damp, darkened corner. He poked at it and he could tell what fed it: The hot white focus of someone’s attention and intention. To be beheld or beloved, cradled and touched.

If you were taking it, at least that meant someone was giving it to you, and didn't Richie scream daily for something, anything to be given?

Of course there was pain involved. Maybe that meant it was worth it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is the intro line from WTF with Marc Maron (and originally a line from Almost Famous), because “closeted middle-aged stand-up comedian” immediately makes me think of Todd Glass’s 2012 coming out interview, a problematic but earnest and semi-historical artifact.
> 
> Sunny Day Real Estate's [How It Feels To Be Something On](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjVTp9aPvog)
> 
> content warnings:  
> \- homophobic and misogynistic slurs are used briefly near the end of this chapter  
> \- an unnamed minor character tells a transphobic and homophobic joke near the beginning  
> \- richie's previous romantic/sexual relationship with a cis lesbian woman is discussed  
> \- eddie is in recovery for an opioid addiction that is referenced near the end  
> \- this fic as a whole deals very heavily with internalized homophobia, particularly richie's, but also eddie's
> 
> let me know at any point if i missed anything that i can tag better!


	2. Paramus, New Jersey: 2010

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie and Eddie do Before Sunrise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See chapter end notes for detailed content warnings.

By the time he got home, there was snow on the ground. The forecast had assured them for days that the storm was going to pass before it reached the city, and then overnight, the maps had changed and dumped five inches of sleet straight out of the sky. Across the Hudson, it wasn’t meant to rise above a light dusting, so Eddie figured he could get away with taking the Reatta home for the night. He thought he deserved a little indulgence. He’d replaced the headlight motors and finally gotten the cassette deck to work that day, and that wiring had been a real bear to reinstall. 

On the drive home, he’d run through his new set. He had a slot that weekend at some stupid little bar in Hoboken. It was mostly just a favor for some guy he’d met a trade show, but he was picking up stage time at a steady clip these days, enjoying the stretch of his jaw around the head of a mic, the friendly camaraderie of a drunken hometown audience. It was the closest to performing when he was just starting out — eighteen and sneaking out of Ma’s house after bedtime _—_ that he’d felt in years. Back then, he’d just wanted someone to listen to him without commandeering halfway, no “Eddie-Bear, you can’t” or “Eddie-Bear, you shouldn’t” or “Eddie-Bear, that’s not what little boys are supposed to do” shorting him fifty and some change before he even got a chance to work himself up and out of breath.

It had mostly worked for more than a decade, as he slowly discovered that being heard always came with conditions. And then suddenly, he was nearly 35, in recovery, a former D-lister, licking his wounds in suburban New Jersey.

“It’s not a comeback,” he’d told the interviewer earlier that month, “There’s no plan. I’m just feeling it out, figuring out what I enjoy right now, how comedy fits into my life.” People listening to him spit out canned lines he’d recited to his windshield wipers was more of a comfort than a revelation, these days. Though it was still nice, either way.

 _rediscovering the magic!!_ Bev had written when she’d texted him the article link. 

_Fuck you!!!_ he’d sent back. _Embargo on all references to my divorce proceedings._

_aw, i dont get a sympathy pass? comrade in arms? >:( _

He pulled into his garage, jangling his keys around his index finger as he stepped out of the car. The screen door rattled when he pulled it. He told himself again to remember to oil the hinges sometime that weekend.

Inside, Eddie knelt to take his loafers off, the pair he changed into when he left the garage, and flicked on the hallway light, the kitchen light, in quick succession. He washed his hands in the kitchen sink and pulled the stir fry he’d made on Wednesday out of the fridge. He idly wiped down the counter with a Clorox wipe as he watched the bowl spin slowly through the door of the microwave. He washed his hands again.

He ate the stir fry with brown rice on the couch, watching old episodes of Laugh-In. At some point, he nodded off, only jerking awake when his phone chimed, two pings in quick succession, then a third a moment later.

 **Beverly Marsh:** hey eddie <3  
**Beverly Marsh:** richie’s stuck at newark  
**Beverly Marsh:** carla lives close by right? i might ask if she’d let him crash for the night. wanted to give u a heads up tho

Eddie looked at the time. It was ten till midnight.

The last time he’d seen Richie in person was more than a year ago, at Bev’s wedding. They’d spoken for just a few minutes, clipped and cordial, a dry, perfunctory handshake at the rehearsal dinner in front of Bill and his new girlfriend. 

Richie’s show had premiered a few months earlier, so Tom led him around to network at the reception — Richie being the only one of Bev’s male friends that he seemed to be able to tolerate. Eddie thought it was clear, even then, that Tom only liked Richie because he didn’t respect him at all. Richie himself had always been like that, visibly craving approval so badly that he vibrated with it. It used to feel good to give it to him, before Eddie realized that it wasn’t who it came from, but how much that he got, that mattered to Richie. These days, he was probably peaking on it. He got it poured down his throat every Tuesday at ten Pacific.

Eddie stood up and walked to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water. He downed it in three clarifying gulps. He typed back.

 **Eddie Kaspbrak:** _She’s probably asleep already_ _  
_**Eddie Kaspbrak:** _I could pick him up_  
**Beverly Marsh:** this wasnt a ploy to get you to  
**Eddie Kaspbrak:** _I didn’t think it was_ _  
_**Eddie Kaspbrak:** _What time’s his flight_ _  
_**Beverly Marsh:** he says 9am  
**Eddie Kaspbrak:** _Yeah that works_

At the reception, Mike sat with Ben and Eddie at first, in solidarity, but even he couldn’t resist the isle of sirens that was an SNL power wedding, pulled eventually into the orbit of this-or-that producer. That left Ben and Eddie to get shitfaced together. Both brokenhearted, in some way or ways, by the industry and the vows it refused to uphold.

By eleven, Ben was nearly falling out of his seat, so Eddie hefted him out of his chair and fished the room key out of his suit pocket. He brought him up to the room Ben was sharing with Richie, letting him lean his big frame into Eddie’s shoulder. “You’re a good egg, Eddie,” Ben slurred at him in the elevator. “Eggdie,” he giggled, and then wouldn’t stop repeating it until Eddie hauled him into the room and deposited him on the far bed.

He tugged off Ben’s shoes and pushed down on his shoulders and back until he’d rolled on his side. Ben's laugh came in a slurred, slowed drip as Eddie reached behind him to slot a pillow against his back. “Doctor K...Don’t worr- I feel fine...” Ben murmured, the words crumbling off as he smashed his face into the mattress.

Eddie filled a glass of water in the bathroom and brought it out to set down on the nightstand, saying “And you’ll be fine, just get some rest, okay?” Ben turned his head up towards Eddie and sent him a sweet curve of a smile. “Gon’ sleep,” he mumbled. Eddie laid the back of his hand briefly against Ben’s forehead. Regular body temperature, even breathing, lethargic but coherent speech. “You’ll be fine,” he repeated. “Good night, Ben.”

Eddie walked back towards the door, passing Richie’s side of the room. For a few minutes he just stood there, cataloging all this manifest residue of Richie’s life. The discarded suit jacket on the bed. The contact solution on the dresser. The suitcase, open, an airport novel balanced on top of a mound of clothing inside. 

It was probably Pavlovian, why he squirmed, standing there at the foot of the empty bed. Hotel plus Richie equals sex. That was the whole proof. QED.

Obviously he still thought about it; at least the uncomplicated part. He jerked off to it frequently enough that it took no time at all for him to recognize it treading there, right along the surface. It was just efficient to conjure up Richie’s vowelly panting when Eddie moved deep and solid inside him, or the sucked-in spaceship sound he made out of his throat when Eddie pressed the pads of his fingers to its sides. The memories got him off faster than porn — which he always overthought — and faster than sex with another person, too. Why spend hours and his precious reserves of self-confidence on the performance of being interesting, interested, and fuckable, all for something that was going to last thirty minutes, tops? It was one hour to the Six Flags in Ocean County and you could drive down there, pick up a flash pass, and hit up two coasters and a teacup ride for the same ratio of effort to reward.

Eddie was sharing a room with Mike at the hotel, because Tom had convinced Bev that he wanted a small, private wedding and that meant it was normal that none of her unmarried friends got plus-ones (The Hollywood Reporter's page ten darling Audra Phillips notwithstanding), even though they were still expected for _his_ single friends. _They’re older. More established. Baby girl, your friends are young! All they need is an open bar to have a good time, right, Eddie?_ Tom had winked at him when he said this, over one of the quarterly dinners in the city that were the only times Eddie had seen Bev in person those days.

 **Beverly Marsh:** babe ru sure  
**Beverly Marsh:** he can still get a hotel  
**Beverly Marsh:** hes just been on tour for a while so i thought he’d appreciate it. nbd if not!  
**Eddie Kaspbrak:** _I promise I’m okay with it. I won’t be weird_ _  
_ **Eddie Kaspbrak:** _He can say no. But we used to be friends. I think we can be adults about it_

Mike wasn’t back yet when Eddie returned from dropping off Ben. Eddie figured he’d still get a headstart on sleep, since he’d been put in charge of lugging all of the wedding gifts to Bev’s (Tom’s) apartment in the morning.

He got dressed and brushed his teeth, watching the new lines on his face flex in the mirror. He turned the TV on to a George Lopez marathon and wrapped himself up into the blanket he’d brought from home.

At three in the morning, the hotel phone rang. Eddie picked up because he was a light sleeper, which Richie knew. 

“Eddie?” came the voice on the other end.

“Yeah,” he said softly, into the receiver, anchored by the rolling rhythm of Mike’s snores on the other side of the room. 

“Thank you. For taking care of Ben,”

“Yeah, well,” Eddie said. “We’re friends too.”

“I know. I just.” For a long beat the line was quiet again. Then, “You looked good tonight.”

“Rich,” Eddie started, tugging the tail end of it out.

“Just. Once?” Richie asked, “My flight’s early, you won’t see me again.”

Eddie said nothing. He waited.

“Eddie, c’mon, we’re both drunk. Single. Wedding rules, so it barely counts,” Richie said, lying anywhere from partially or completely.

“It’s like rubbing one out to an old rerun,” he tried again, this time with a pleading edge that Eddie tried valiantly not to focus on.

“Maybe I’m not single,” said Eddie. His hand skirted the band of his shorts, and he let it lay there, recording the beat of his breath. “You don’t know for sure, and you called anyway.”

“Mm-hm.”

What was that saying? Roundabout was fair play?

“You did because you’re desperate,” he finally relented. Giving permission.

“Yeah,” said Richie, on an inhale.

 **Beverly Marsh:** he said “fuck no”  
**Beverly Marsh:** :(  
**Eddie Kaspbrak:** _What’s his number_

The phone sex was good. It always had been, because they were both professional talkers. Richie, whose mouth was professionally dirty, went needy and loud, and Eddie, whose mouth was professionally loud, went gravelly and dirty.

That last time, at the wedding, was somewhat of an anomaly, since there’d been roommates involved, and Eddie, at least, wasn’t much of exhibitionist. He’d taken the phone — thankfully cordless — into the bathroom, and laid a towel down on the closed top of the toilet seat.

“Are you still in bed?” he whispered.

“Yeah, but Ben’s completely passed out.”

“Richie.”

“Relax, I can be quiet,” Richie said, close into the receiver. “Please,” he added, “Let me be quiet for you.”

Eddie said, “If Ben wakes up, you’re not allowed to come.”

“Mm, it might be too late if that happens.”

He had forgotten how easy it was to talk to Richie like this. He flipped his anxieties into desires and Richie was smooth and pliable under his palms.

“Richie,” he repeated.

“I thought you liked how I sound anyway.”

“Not tonight,” Eddie growled, “You said you wanted to be quiet for me. You can do that, right?

“Uh-huh,” Richie whimpered, but it was soft enough that Eddie let it slide.

“Good. Touch yourself.”

Richie’s breaths sped up, puffing up into short, quick huffs.

“Good boy,” Eddie muttered, swirling a hand over the tip of his dick through his shorts. He imagined Richie squirming in bed, the hardened length of him dewy and wet. “Bite down on a pillow for me. Get your mouth all stuffed up. If I was there, I would stick the head of my cock there. You wouldn’t get to suck, though. You just have to hold it, keep me warm. Doesn’t it feel good plugging up your mouth?”

“Don’t answer that, baby. Just nod your head like a good little boy. There you go,” Eddie cooed. He was gripping his own dick through the fabric now, hoping that the translation of his hand through cloth would be foreign enough to dupe for someone else’s — Richie’s, even.

“You feel it up against the roof of your mouth, you like how it’s swelled up in there, yeah?”

Richie staring up at him, glassy-eyed, lips stretched taut around Eddie’s dick.

“You’d like that, huh. Or, hm, you want my fingers? You want me to press right up against your pretty little hole?”

The solid weight of him perched in Eddie’s lap, their hands locked together for leverage.

“How long has it been since you were fucked that good, Richie? Remember how much of me you could take? Remember sitting all the way down on it, your back against my chest, so far down, so tight, you could feel my balls rubbing against your ass.”

Richie moaned, two-toned, some of the valley-girl scratch of his laugh floating above the deep bass of a sigh. Oil and water.

“I always liked that so much because you let me suck on your shoulder blades and kiss your neck. You’d shiver so, so much, you were so hot for it.”

Eddie was stripping his cock now, his hand spread as far as it could along the length of it. He ground the heel of his palm into the middle and rubbed two of his fingers ardently at the tip. It was a poor substitute for Richie’s big fisherman hands, the way he might run the back of one over Eddie’s shaft, sweeping against the grain of the hair on his knuckles.

Richie was uncut, and he’d always liked when Eddie slid the sleeve of skin up and down over the head of his cock. Eddie imagined the solid weight of it in his hand, pressing his thumb into the slickness under the hood. “Mm-hm baby, I know you’re close,” he said, drunk on it, “But you have to stay quiet for me. It’ll be so good if you stay quiet for me. It’ll be everything I want.”

“I wanna –” Richie gasped.

“Yeah, you wanna give me what I want? Thank you so much, you’re doing so well, you’re so nice to me. Bite down on that pillow again for me, okay? I’m going to touch you now just like this.”

Finally Eddie pushed his shorts down and put his bare hand on his cock. He brought the phone down so that the receiver was level of his groin and stroked, fast. The _slap-slap-slap_ of his hand on his cock rang in his ears like a blaring horn, but it was already too late. He was too far gone. He was going to have to trust the thickness of the bathroom door and the sureness of Mike’s Zinfandel-induced sleep.

He let Richie hear him for a minute and then brought the phone back up to his mouth.

“Yeah, can you tell how hard I am? Just listening to you squirming around, fucking your fist, trying to hold in all your slutty sounds. You’re being so good for me, okay, you did such a beautiful job. I’m going to let you come on my face and then you’re going to lick it off me all clean, okay, Richie? Can you do that for me right now?”

Richie came with a muffled groan and a series of stertorous pants, _hanh-enh-ahhhh_ , mainlining them direct into Eddie’s ear.

Richie trembling boneless, spread-eagled atop the sheets.

“You got all over my face,” he said, rambling frantically, “I’m still holding your big, thick dick in my hand. I’m rubbing it against my cheek so I can get every drop of your cum. Will you still lick it off, Rich? Can I hear you lick and swallow for me?”

Richie, who was always so obedient and _good_ , made soft slurping sounds into the phone. Right there, just like that: the smack of his tongue to his lip and the swill of saliva against his palate.

Eddie shot right on top of his discarded shorts, pooled into dark ripples against the clean ceramic tile.

They were both breathing heavily. Not quite in tandem.

“Well,” Richie said after a while, “Ben’s still asleep.”

“Oh. That’s good,” said Eddie, but his voice came out stiff and practiced. He was suddenly intensely embarrassed. Jerking off alone in the bathroom at a wedding, still fucking a guy who was so deep in the closet that he was probably already thinking of how to recast Eddie as an unlucky butterface bridesmaid.

Richie sounded conspicuously awkward too. “Alright. Uh, good night.”

Eddie kicked at his ruined sleep shorts. “Yeah, have a safe flight,” he said, and hung up. 

**Eddie Kaspbrak:** _Hey if you really don’t want me to come, I understand. But just so you know, I’m not being forced into this._ _  
_**Eddie Kaspbrak:** _I offered._ _  
_**Eddie Kaspbrak:** _We don’t have to talk at all. I can stay at a friend’s place and just drive you back in the morning if you prefer._ _  
_**Eddie Kaspbrak:** _Regardless I hope you’re doing well._ _  
_**Eddie Kaspbrak:** _BTW you don’t have to reply._

He didn’t have any illusions about it, when they first started having sex. Eddie was only two and a half toes out of the closet himself, so it wasn’t like he had much ground to stand on. Keeping everything under wraps was an unspoken guarantee, and sort of hot, besides.

But it turned out there was a difference between Eddie, newly liberated and going buckwild in the dressing room, and Richie, comfortable and settled in the same threadbare sweater he’d been wearing for half a decade. Richie, whose level of self-awareness was shockingly elastic. He refused to meet Eddie for drinks in the West Village. He got angry when Eddie took a gig at a Pride benefit, even though he was still telling everyone he was doing it as an _ally_.

“I don’t even see why you’re mad. I’m not gonna go up there and start talking about fucking you. Or fucking anyone, for that matter. Honestly, you could do it too. It’s a _charity_ event, for god’s sake,” he yelled one night over the phone, “Patton Oswalt’s going to be there, and he just got married. To a woman.”

“You know I couldn’t,” Richie hissed back, “It’s not - goddamn - I have a specific image, you know that. And the way my career is going is – god, I just...I can’t afford any kind of suspicion."

“Suspicion? Do you know how fucking villainous you sound now? This is how Lindsey Graham’s rent boy feels, I guarantee you.”

Richie made a frustrated noise. “I mean, they wouldn’t want me there, anyway. Not like my shit is the pinnacle of tolerance. It’s just – it’s better for everyone.”

“No one’s asking you to be Harvey fucking Milk, okay?” He knocked his forehead into his other hand, massaging the temple, and said, “Just do the right thing, for once, Richie, and if _you_ won’t, at least let _me_ try to.”

Richie was wrong, later on, about Eddie’s own integrity.

Eddie went to the event, and he started two sentences off with “As a straight man,” _looking everyone in the eye and lying to their faces,_ Richie had accused, and he stood up next to Patton Oswalt when the MC said “Round of applause for all of our allies who performed tonight! You haven’t seen the light yet, but we appreciate you anyway!” and okay, yeah, he didn’t feel good, he still felt like shit, actually, but it also made him think that _not_ feeling like shit was possible — and wasn’t that the point, in the end?

 **Unknown Number:** terminal b _  
_ **Eddie Kaspbrak:** _25 minutes_

* * *

Traffic out of Newark was horrendous. Bumper-to-bumper, with ice on the road. Someone two cars ahead had a broken taillight. Eddie was trying very actively not to seethe, his fingers wrapped tight around the steering wheel, knuckles white with lack of circulation. He glanced every so often over at Richie, who had his head tipped against the window and was refusing to make eye contact.

Richie hadn’t said anything since he’d picked him up outside of the Delta concourse, except for a dry “Cool car” right after Eddie opened the side door. Which. It was an ‘88 Reatta! Next time he’d show up in the Eldorado he was eyeing online and see what Richie said then.

He looked different than he did on TV. They always said celebrities were smaller in person, which in Eddie’s experience was generally true; he’d been in a movie once with Mark Wahlberg, who was about Eddie’s size and had a very punchable face, especially up-close.

Richie, though, was someone whose slouch made him deceptively large no matter what. Here he looked huge compared to the version Eddie guiltily watched on screen, the width of his torso spanning the entire passenger seat, his knees bumping up against the glove compartment.

Neither of them had ever been quite comfortable with silence, which was why they’d ultimately ended up friends. Both of them always racing to fill the dead air with _something, anything, hello, can anyone hear me_? Eventually, things were going to catch, like flint, or a virus.

Eddie turned on the cassette player, Glenn Frey crooning “take it easy,” and Richie scoffed, “You still have shit taste in music, huh.”

Eddie glared at the bumper in front of him. It had one of those “COEXIST” stickers on it and a set of stick figure family members, a mother, a father, two children, a dog. He fantasized about clubbing Richie over the head with one of the stick figure arms.

“Worse than shit, actually. Since your taste doesn’t exist. You have music constipation.”

Eddie eyed him through the rearview mirror. He had on that slightly sour twist to his mouth that he got when he actually felt bad about what he’d said. The look was rare enough that it was 50/50 on whether he’d apologize for it. He watched as Richie’s eyebrows scrambled into a complicated scrunch and then as his mouth pedaled right over it.

“Isn’t that a junkie symptom anyway? Sorry, forgot you had a pre-existing condition,” he said, his lips pushed out in half-redress.

Eddie snorted, returning the serve. “You still have no brain-to-mouth filter. Passing on verbal cholera your full-time job?” 

“Oh you watch my show! I’m flattered. I didn’t think you cared,” Richie sneered.

“Hard to avoid it. You got fuckin’ ads everywhere.” He smacked the top of the steering wheel and flung his forearm out so as to encompass most of the bus stops in the tri-state area.

Eddie took the exit ramp onto Midland, traffic having eased up after they’d passed Passaic some miles back. 

“Get nauseous at the sight of my ugly mug?”

“Not anymore,” Eddie said, probably too revealing.

Richie didn’t notice. “Yeah, tell me how you really feel.”

And no, that wasn’t what he’d wanted either.

“Listen,” he said, trying again. “I’m happy for you, Richie, honestly. You made it, man. You have a whole tag on the Getty Images server. You have something you can call your own.”

“Bullshit,” said Richie.

If he focused for a second out of the corner of his eye, he could see the fine lines forming around Richie’s mouth, this archeological record of his wide-mouthed laugh. For another second, he let himself ache to trace it, to pencil in the ridge with the tip of a nail.

“Alright,” said Eddie.

The lingering radius of the highway gave in to tree-lined streets and copycat houses.

He usually did this staring at himself in the bathroom mirror, but Richie-in-real-life wasn’t looking at him head-on. It turned out that this was easier, since he didn’t have to worry so much about being seen casting a weird, unattractive grimace halfway through.

“Toze OS?” He started, sucking in a deep breath, “The fucking name barely makes any fucking sense. Your producers were hoping some maligned thirteen-year-olds hopped up on Ritalin and blue light would misspell Tosh’s show, huh? At least his has a functional green screen. Must suck rat-dick that you blew all your budget on naturopathy scams for your recurring athlete’s foot,” — he wasn’t sold on the cadence of “athlete’s foot” over “ringworm,” but he thought it was sounding good, regardless — “By the way, how’s it feel to be the newest addition to _that_ human centipede? Saget, McHale, Tosh, Tozier: just one long extended asshole. You really fit right in. I bet you’ve finally made enough selling fan letters from future school shooters on eBay to fund your mom’s vaginoplasty.”

He reared back, breathless, and snuck a glance beside him. Richie didn’t laugh but he pulled his lips together to stop from smiling. Eddie could tell because he saw his chest vibrate a little, pushing his torso back into the leather seat.

They were rounding onto Eddie’s neighborhood now, the streetlights mixing warm yellow onto the empty sidewalks. He turned the corner into his cul-de-sac, but he didn’t pull into the driveway.

Eddie tapped his fingers on the steering wheel.

“You hungry?” he asked. He didn’t bother to take his foot off the gas.

* * *

The first time they’d met, Eddie had been high. Not to cede any moral high ground there, because Richie had been too, stumbling out of the tiny bathroom in Bev’s first New York apartment, draped over her arm like a sentient slinky, the both of them giggling into each other’s hair and not inconspicuously rubbing at the skin under their nostrils.

“Eddie, Eddie! Come meet my other best friend,” Bev had exclaimed from across the room, and dragged the both of them over to where Eddie was standing awkwardly by the bookcase, attempting to casually read a book on interior design, both because he was in the sparkly euphoric phase of hydrocodone that made any mundane point of hyperfocus revelatory, and because he was supremely uncool and thus far had not been able to sustain a conversation with any of Bev’s friends for longer than three minutes.

“New York best friend, meet Chicago best friend. Chicago best friend, meet New York best friend,” Bev said proudly.

Bev, especially then, was a person who held all the people around her at a self-preservational distance, which she masked with ambushing doses of affection. Eddie didn’t hold it against her, since there was a goal there that he was familiar with. Induce the feeling in order to have it. “Best friend” from anyone else would have been presumptuous, but he understood the use case.

Richie was of a type that he had much less patience for _—_ uncouth and overfamiliar without precedent or justification. In comedy, overgrown class clowns like him were a dime in a dozen. They all thought they were the vanguard of counter-culture because they wanted to say slurs and show people their dicks.

“Hi, Eddie. What a cute little nickname. You’re probably the same size you were as when you got it,” Richie had said, playfully rude in that way that was incredibly offensive when it came from someone you were just now meeting.

Eddie ignored this random insult from a perfect stranger, and stuck his hand out to shake instead. "Eddie Kaspbrak." He was high, sure, but he still had manners.

Richie slapped it giddily and yelled, “Kasss-brak, I know a Kasprak! You wouldn’t happen to know a Mrs. Kas-bbbrak would you?”

Eddie scrunched his nose up. “Um. My mother, I guess?”

“Bingo! Kaspbrak...” Richie exclaimed with a huge, toothy smile, “That’s what she tells me to scream when I’m slammin’ her ass into the mattress.”

The next morning, Eddie attended Bev’s more exclusive birthday brunch, populated by two of her friends from high school, her roommate Greta, a handful of comedy people (Eddie and Richie included), and someone she had met at a fashion internship three years ago.

He had only known Bev for four months at that point, so he thought it was only proper to relegate himself to one of the seats farther away from her. Bev was talking animatedly to Richie while he did this, and she beckoned him closer when she noticed, but Eddie shook his head conciliatorily and tried to give her an encouraging smile. Bev pouted minutely but didn’t press any further.

He sat down next to Greta instead, because he remembered she was also allergic to tree nuts, and gave her a polite dip of a head nod, which she didn’t acknowledge. Hopefully Greta had fallen face-first into a ditch at some point during the succeeding seven years.

Richie held court on the other end of the table, pulling out Bev’s loud, honking laugh as they re-enacted the _When Harry Met Sally_ diner scene. Richie was cracking up by the end, saying “Let’s do _Pulp Fiction_ next, Red. You’d be perfect for Honey Bunny." He didn’t talk to Eddie at all, except for when they all got up to leave and he spotted Eddie’s messenger bag, which he’d brought so that he could work on cover letters after brunch. “Is that a purse, Edwina?” he said, loud and blustering, “Oh man, you going to get your nails done after this?”

“Fuck you, it’s a messenger bag for men,” said Eddie, with more vitriol than he’d expected. He’d figured through most of the preceding hour that Richie didn’t even remember his name, and for some reason it felt more insulting to know now that he actually did.

Bev punched Richie in the shoulder and gave him a stern look until he said “Just kidding, dude, it looks like a nice quality bag” so that everyone else could resume packing up and pretend that it had never happened.

Guys like Richie were always trying to impress Bev, and Eddie knew how easy it could be to alight yourself in that level of sustained attention, even when you knew or wanted better. He tried to broach the topic later that week and Bev asked, “Me and Richie?” with such genuine surprise in her voice that he had been embarrassed, because of course, he was overstepping, he really didn’t know her like that yet. “It’s not like that at all,” she said, “He’s - well, I think Richie’s got his own stuff going on.”

“Oh okay,” said Eddie, not understanding.

On bad days, he used to think it was fucking ludicrous and completely unsustainable for Richie to think he could fool everyone the way he did. He had to make himself remember, these days, that he was wrong — how easy it was to hide things that people didn’t want to see.

“This is sweet,” Richie was saying, “Cute little retro diner. You showing me the charms of small-town life, Luke?” He held the door open for him, arm boxed over half the entryway, so that Eddie had to duck under it to pass through, the world’s dumbest game of limbo. He combed his fingers through the ungelled side of his hair and flicked Richie the bird on the other side. 

“You’re sure as hell not Lorelai if I am.”

“No, I figured I was Rachel.” 

A woman behind the counter thumbing idly through the pages of a big textbook looked to be the only person there. She had on a pair of lime-green earbuds under a mound of curly blonde hair and was tapping her foot to an invisible beat. The sound of her shoe against the linoleum floor was hollow and echoic.

Eddie cleared his throat and rapped twice on the hostess stand.

“Oh,” the woman said, and looked up, startled. She’d flipped the book closed on instinct. Eddie squinted to read the cover. _Phlebotomy Essentials_ , it said, an array of test tubes with brightly colored caps pictured on it.

She shuffled to her feet and shot them a bright smile. “How are you boys doing tonight?” she asked.

“Peachy keen!” said Richie, teeth out.

“Table for two,” said Eddie, holding up two fingers and elbowing Richie in the side.

“I’m Marie,” the woman said, her hips swaying as she walked them to a booth, menus in hand. “I’ll be taking care of you today. Y’all holler if you need anything, okay?”

They nodded diligently as Marie set the menus down into a booth by the front window.

“Anyways, I think this place is owned by Denny’s,” he said after she left.

Richie snorted. “Mm, the Denny’s monopoly.”

They both stared at the napkin holder.

Marie came back with two cups of water.

She set down two plastic straws, still in their wrappers, and two sets of silverware swaddled in paper napkins. “You boys want anything else to drink?”

Eddie scraped a nail against the textured plastic of the cup. “I’ll have a black coffee,” he said.

“And how ‘bout you?” Marie asked, turning to Richie.

Richie squinted at Eddie but he said, “Same here.”

Marie left again. “I hear congrats are in order,” Richie said next, stretching the straw wrapper between his fingers.

“What?” Eddie asked. He had his menu open. There was a very loving photograph of a pulled pork sandwich in it and he was hit with a sudden craving. Barbecue sauce was going to wreak havoc on his cholesterol. He also usually didn’t like to eat things that messy with other people around, but. Whatever. Richie probably still ate like shit, so he figured it didn’t matter.

“Your gay-butante,” Richie said. Eddie put his menu down and looked properly at him. Richie was doing jazz hands.

“Oh,” Eddie replied. “You read that.”

Richie squinted again. “Of course I did. Now I can’t tell if you’re making fun of me.”

“Aren’t you making fun of me?”

“No,” said Richie, with surprising seriousness. He leaned forward. “I know it’s hard to believe that I’m not completely a homophobic asshole, but I’d actually like to think I possess a little bit of human decency.”

He’d put on weight, Eddie decided. It had filled in the broad lines of his chest and widened the bulk of his forearms propped up on the table.

“Human?” Eddie said. He sounded distracted, he could tell.

“Hmm,” Richie murmured. “Forgot you had more of a thing for ents, you Tolkein freak.” His voice had lowered minutely and he levered himself even further forward by the elbows. Eddie pushed saliva into the front of his mouth.

“Ready to order?” Marie asked. Eddie startled and swallowed quickly. He hadn’t even seen her approach.

“I’ll have the deluxe blueberry pancakes,” said Richie.

Eddie frowned. “I’ll get the grilled chicken,” he said.

“Sure, doll. Fries or salad?” 

He looked at Richie, who had an eyebrow raised and half a smirk on his face. _Boring as ever, Eds_ , it said.

“Fries, thank you,” he answered, not looking at Richie as he held his menu back out to Marie. 

She nodded again, “I’ll get that started for y’all,” and walked off, presumably towards the kitchen. Eddie swiveled back toward Richie, who was back to sitting slouched in the booth, this time while stabbing at his phone screen aggressively with an index finger. Eddie squinted at it, trying to look closer. On screen, images of various fruits whizzed by. They would bisect and make weird squelching sounds whenever Richie jabbed his finger at them.

“You know how many germs have accumulated on that thing,” he said, “I bet you play that shit on the toilet. It’s probably covered in Hep B.”

“God, I didn’t miss _this_ ,” Richie muttered, clicking the side of the phone so that the screen went black and tossing it face down on the table. He dipped his napkin in his water and made a show of wiping the phone down with it.

“Okay, now you’re gonna like, waterlog it,” said Eddie.

“Anything to keep it germ-free,” Richie replied, sing-song and mockingly, but he set both the napkin and the phone aside again and clasped his hands together in front. He leveled a gaze back to Eddie and said, in the same tone of voice, “You have my full attention now, sir.”

Eddie ignored that. “So you been talking to Bev a lot?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m actually flying out to see her first, before I head back to Cali.” Richie said, relaxing a bit. He stuck his thumb and pinky out in a “surf’s up” gesture.

“Now that I think of it, I might as well see Stan and Patty too, since it’s their house,” he continued, trying for a Stan deadpan but not quite hitting it and getting a Mike one instead. “But Bev, yeah. I’ve been trying to do a call with her like once a week. Ever since she told me about everything. She mentioned she was staying with you a few months ago? When she first left.”

“Not with me, actually. With Kay. Bev’s best friend from high school. She owns the shop I’m working at. That’s why I moved out here, actually.”

Richie raised his eyebrows. Eddie suppressed a laugh. He had forgotten that this made Richie look like a lemur and that he had said as much once, and then Bev and Mike had chased him around calling him King Julien for an entire afternoon. The memory made him feel fond, and a little guilty. He told himself, _growing apart is a four-way street_. In the next thought, the voice in his head said, _well, you didn’t have to crash your car at the intersection_.

He shook his head. “I meant for the _job_. Not for Kay. She’s a lesbian.”

Richie said, “I used to date a lesbian.”

“Yeah, obviously,” Eddie snapped, unthinkingly. 

“Nah, that’s great, Ed,” Richie said. He stretched his arm around the back of his seat, like a teenager making a move at the matinee. “You really haven’t lost it, huh.”

Eddie didn’t think at all about slotting into the space under his arm. “Bev and I still saw each other a lot, though, when she was here,” he said instead.

“Oh right, I guess you two are divorce buddies now.”

Eddie rolled his eyes. 

“I wish I’d chased him off the first time I saw his stupid fucking cold brew in her fridge,” Eddie said, tightening his jaw. “But you two looked friendly at the wedding,” he added, to be a dick.

Richie grimaced. “Yeah, but he always gave me the willies. Like he got so fucking furious at Bev for the tiniest things. Remember he blew up at her when the centerpieces didn’t come on time for the rehearsal dinner? God, I was so self-centered. I should have seen it.” His brow furrowed and flattened. “It was like she dropped off the face of the Earth, after. Fuck. I thought she was in, like, the honeymoon phase, or whatever.” He put his hand down and looked searchingly into his lap. “And then I got this message from her new number three weeks after she got out. Three weeks I wasn’t there for her. Three years, really. I was barely there for her that whole time. Because, what? I was scared? I was avoidant? I realized I let all this other bullshit overtake the people I really cared about.” He looked about six seconds away from holding back tears.

Eddie asked hesitantly, “The other bullshit being me?” 

“Don’t get a big head, Eddie. It’s not all about you,” Richie scoffed.

“You said avoidant. You were avoiding me.”

Richie glared at him.

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t have. I was avoiding you too. Look, it was bad. I barely talked to Stan for a year. What you did was normal. She doesn’t blame you,” Eddie said.

“I told you, it wasn’t all about you,” Richie said through gritted teeth. “Well, don’t get me wrong. You made for a stellar excuse. But the thing is, see, I was making the show and she was on _motherfucking SNL_ , and we didn’t talk much, but I thought...Well, we always talked about making it, and then we _made_ it, and...and I thought that we’d both gotten what we wanted.” 

He sounded so genuinely, heartbreakingly sad, that Eddie felt, very viscerally, that he had just kicked a puppy. He suddenly remembered that oh, this is why everyone wanted to take care of Richie. He was not the type of person who always took care of himself.

Eddie said, “It’s not your fault. What were you going to do? You live 3,000 miles away.”

Richie sniffled.

“I mean, I was _right here_ ,” he said. More of it spilled out than he’d intended. “And I couldn’t see all of it either. Like, I had my shit, but I was, I don’t know, jealous, I guess. I figured she was successful now, and she didn’t need me, and I hated Tom but I still believed him when he said they were happy. And so I let myself be bitter and –” Eddie rubbed at his eyes and tried to focus on the fluorescent panels overhead so that he wouldn’t cry too. 

“You got her out though,” Richie said, looking down at his hands. “In the end.”

“I wish we did at the beginning,” Eddie said, squeezing his eyes shut. He took a centering pair of four-count breaths and opened them again. Richie was looking at him. Eddie held his breath, another four-count, the oxygen sitting suspended in his chest.

He let himself look back.

Richie, wearing his thick, plastic framed glasses — they made him stick to contacts on the show — with his hair still upswept from the wind outside. And Eddie, who'd never quite learned to temper the greed that set in as soon as he knew he was out of his mother's sight, drinking him in, trying to burn the precise shape of Richie's winsome face onto his retinas.

Abruptly, Richie slammed his hands onto the table and exclaimed, “Fuck Tom!”

Eddie nearly jumped but he laughed anyway.

“Fuck Tom!” he yelled too, loud enough for the kitchen staff to hear. There was an audible clatter that made him wince. He lowered his voice ten decibels and said, “I’d lance a boil into his shaving cream.”

It caught Richie in a wild, uncontrolled laugh. “I’d drain my snot into his cooking oil,” he said in response.

“I’d shave my toe hairs onto his toothbrush.”

“I’d pour an enema into his tonic water.” 

Eddie saw Marie approach, from behind Richie’s head this time, probably to shush them. Her eyes widened and she backed away upon entering hearing distance.

* * *

They didn’t talk much again after the food came out, Eddie spending most of his time cutting his chicken into even pieces.

The chicken itself was dry and had very little seasoning. That was fine, though. He had already decided on one major indulgence tonight, so this was going to help with stabilizing the karmic balance.

He was polishing off one of the two charred chicken breasts on his plate when Richie said, apropos of nothing, “I’m gay.” He speared a piece of blueberry pancake into his mouth. It left a dark violet stain on the bottom curve of his top lip. Eddie stared at it.

Richie rolled his eyes at his own confession. “Yeah, I know, breaking news, far as you’re concerned. Biggest, ‘no shit,’ ever. Yuk it up, man. Take your victory lap.”

“No, Richie. That’s um. That’s really big. That’s a big deal.” 

Richie didn’t say _you know what else is really big?_ but he pursed his lips and nodded to imply it.

“Am I - Have you told anyone else?”

“Again, be a little less self-centered, will ya, Eduardo?” Richie said, but there was less heat. “I told Bev, for one. Although I guess I didn’t need to, because apparently _you_ told her during your little closet reorganization tour.”

“I didn’t say anything about you. She figured it out.”

“Yeah, yeah, same difference.”

“Richie. Anyone with a brain that saw us together during the whole -,” he took a sip of his coffee and re-tried, “While we were together, and then found out about me, would have put it together. That’s not rocket science. It’s maybe like, pre-algebra.”

“Thankfully most of the people we both know are dumb as rocks," Richie said, dry.

Eddie swirled a fry in the little container of ketchup on his plate. “Just Bill,” he said offhandedly.

“This is you telling me that Mike’s up to speed?”

“I’ve transparently referenced it enough that, yeah,” Eddie replied. “Well, he probably doesn’t know that he knows, but he _knows_ ,” he added, gesturing quickly between them, like he was performing the invisible string trick.

The thing about Mike was that he actually _was_ sort of oblivious. He just didn’t wear it earnestly, like Bill, or willfully, like Eddie. It was more like Mike to ignore something until it was directly relevant to him, and then once it was, he acted sagely like he’d known the whole time and that you ought to be embarrassed for assuming otherwise. What Eddie meant by this was that coming out to Mike had been annoying. 

Eddie paused to consider Richie’s question again. “Is this you telling me that you told Stan and Ben?”

Richie three-point-turned his pupils up to the ceiling, thwacking the back of his skull against the vinyl booth, “Technically, not yet. Ben’s too nice and Stan’s too mean to say it to me first, but. Like you said, _everyone knows_ ” he said, sighing. He took a big gulp of his water, “If we’re talking officially, they’re next.” 

“Oh, you have a list?”

“Yeah, after I told Steve. He’s second, you’re third, if we’re counting,” Richie said, flashing his fingers up one by one as he said it. “He was like, cool Rich, I’ve had this post-acceptance contingency plan drawn up for years. It’s cute. He consulted all his gay friends in WeHo. Like, baby’s first steps out of the closet. Step one is sitting all my loved ones down and looking at them very seriously and confessing my little heart out.” He leveled Eddie with a weighty look, and said, “ _Stan, I fucked your father_ ,” in a voice that somehow combined the Darth Vader death rattle and a lisp.

“Loved ones?”

“Well, you’ve been grandfathered in. On account of,” he gestured vaguely over his shoulder, “Back then. Figure I owe it to you. Or maybe I want to prove you wrong.” He shrugged. “Whatever, you get to hear it. I’m gay. Now you can laugh at me for exactly one minute.”

“Seriously. I’m not going to laugh at you. I’m proud of you, even if you’re being an ass about it,” Eddie said, and then threw in, “You limited edition douchecanoe,” so that Richie would know he was being genuine.

“Not gonna call me faggot this time?” Richie asked, eyes trained on the rip in the vinyl on Eddie’s side of the booth.”

Eddie paled. “Richie. I’m sorry, I–”

“I’m just joshin’ ya. Water under the bridge,” Richie said, looking away again, out into the empty dining area. “Besides, what is it that Ryan Gosling says? If I’m a fag, you’re a fag? We’re here, we’re queers, get used to it.”

“No, wait. I can’t say it enough,” Eddie said. Instinctively, he reached his hand out toward the center of the table, before he realized how silly that was, and tried to retract it without looking too obvious. It ended up stuck in the gulf between his plate and Richie’s syrup dispenser.

“I’m sorry. It was really, really uncalled for.”

Richie looked down at the hand. For some inexplicable reason he brought one of his own hands up from his lap and laid it down on the table too. “Uh,” he said, staring down at the space separating their really fucked up game of hokey pokey, “I’m sorry too. For not being honest with myself. With you.” Then he said, very seriously, “For hurting you back. Um. For holding you back.”

Eddie didn’t know how long they held there, suspended in this moment he had imagined for years, sometimes vindictively, sometimes pathetically, usually both. It was bone-crushingly disappointing in its mundanity and world-renderingly thrilling in its actualization. With an uncanny realization, he discovered he took no joy in having been right, and then wondered if, logistically, he had even been right at all.

His chicken was probably getting cold.

Someone cleared their throat. It was Marie, of course. She lifted an eyebrow.

“Ready for the check, boys?” she asked, holding the black plastic tray in her right hand.

* * *

The second person to introduce him to Richie was Stanley Uris. Eddie wasn’t high that time, because it was post-rehab and also immediately post-divorce. He’d been auditioning for increasingly inane bit parts to pay back the legal fees, and eventually nabbed one that needed him to be available on a studio set in Burbank for eight days.

He played a trigger-happy, amusingly incompetent cop in three scenes. Two were cut by the time it hit theaters. It was terrible, studio sequel schlock, which was, in many respects, worse than the indie schlock he was getting in New York, mainly because he couldn’t play it off as finding himself artistically. Although probably in neither case would he be able to play it off that way, as he was discovering that he was something of a terrible actor. He could only play one character: loud, shouty, probable cokehead. Thankfully, it was the mid-aughts then, so his manager was usually screening enough calls to keep him semi-regularly employed.

On the third day, he was sitting by crafty eating a bag of baby carrots when the guy playing his partner approached him. His character was a dry, apathetic type, ego to Eddie’s id, all of five lines in the original script. The only other thing the guy had said directly to Eddie was “Nice day” the morning they got rained out of an outdoor shoot. Eddie hadn’t yet determined if he was just like that, or if he was doing something method.

The guy said, “Dunno why you left that Daily Show gig so early. I thought it’d be at least another three months before your bit was played out.” 

“Got fired,” Eddie said, dipping a carrot carefully in mustard. Mustard on carrots was fine. Not the worst flavor combination but not one he’d likely repeat. Mentally, he moved it into the “flawed but edible” designation.

“Hm,” said the guy — Stan, Eddie finally remembered. He watched Eddie gnaw on the carrot with fascination.

Stan invited him out for drinks after they wrapped that day.

“Sorry, I know this is pretty forward. But you seem cool and we’re sort of desperate,” he’d said to start off, scratching the back of his neck. 

Eddie, for one of the first times in his life, took a moment to think, “huh,” and turn the length of Stan’s body over in his mind. He tried hard to stop any guilt from creeping in. This was another thing he was experimenting with post-divorce. Looking, if not quite touching.

A month later, when he was back in New York, Eddie was going to suck a dick for the first time, and _that_ guy was going to look nothing like Stan and not remind him of Stan _at all_ , except for one fleeting moment when he was going to press his hands onto the guy’s thighs, onto the solid ropes of muscle, and suddenly remember standing under a shaded tent on a Warner Brothers set, checking out Stan Uris’s legs. He was going to laugh, and it was going to vibrate around the guy — whose name was something like Devin — and Devin was going to yank hard at the roots of Eddie’s hair, and Eddie was going to find out that he liked that, too.

But that was a month away.

“My buddies and I like trivia night at this bar in Los Feliz,” Stan continued, “Usually my girlfriend is our fourth, but she starts work tomorrow.”

Eddie let the spike of disappointment pass through his jaw and tried to focus on how annoying it was that he’d pronounced Los Feliz with the accent. 

There was still a nonzero chance that this was all code for group sex. Eddie couldn’t decide which would be worse, having had experience with neither: group sex with two strangers and a guy with an absent girlfriend, or bar trivia. In the end, he remembered he was freshly divorced and trying new things, so he replied, _sure, why not._

It turned out it was, in fact, just trivia. With Stan, his roommate Ben, and his other roommate, Richie Tozier.

Stan looked on aghast, mouthing _You know each other?_ from behind Richie’s back, as Richie lit up and shouted over the music, “So Eddie, you got divorced?”

Eddie was a dumbass, so he still hadn’t understood what that meant.

* * *

The Richie in New Jersey was rifling through the glovebox and Eddie’s limited cassette collection. Kay had picked up a rack of them at a flea market, telling him that it was profoundly stupid to spend all that time sourcing and installing a “historically accurate” (Eddie’s words) tape player and not plan to play any music out of it.

The only one he’d played so far was the one titled “Easy Listening Hits,” because it had seemed self-explanatory. Richie lifted a different one with red and teal cover art up, holding it up to the street lamp light shining from outside the window.

“You’re not the one who bought these, were you.”

“No, but you can pick whatever. Or let me know which ones you like and I’ll listen to them next,” said Eddie.

Richie hummed back in assent. He popped the cassette out of its case and plugged it into the tape player. “In another life, I’d do radio,” he mused.

“Because you have a face for it,” Eddie said, because that’s how the line went.

He pulled into the parking lot behind the Raymour & Flanigan.

“There’s a CCTV blindspot right here,” he said, by way of explanation.

“Oh fuck, are you actually going to murder me?

“Yeah, will you lie back so I can get to your jugular,” Eddie said, putting the car into park. “No, smartass, I thought we could smoke for a bit.”

He reached over to the passenger side to pop open the glovebox again, smirking a bit to himself when he heard Richie suck in a breath.

“There’s a Clorox wipe container in there, could you take it out for me?” he said, nonchalant, still leaning into Richie’s space. “Not the orange one, the green one.”

Richie picked it up and shook it a few times. The contents made a dull clack as they knocked around against each other. Richie let out a low whistle. “You keep your drug paraphernalia in here? That’s actually very impressive, Eds,” he said. He passed Eddie the container.

Cannabis was something Eddie was experimenting with, under the blessing of his therapist. He’d never had the same kind of difficulty with it, or with alcohol, that he had with the pills — Ma’s lectures on _illegal_ drugs ringing through his eardrums before he had a chance to over-imbibe. In his mid-adulthood, he was discovering that it really could do something largely useful for his anxiety, ironing it out and tucking down the edges. It was nice to lie down on top and let his thoughts spool out in amiable circles. He would land on one and then lose it until everything rotated back to the original angle.

Besides, his gateway drug had been Tylenol, comorbid with a mother who was afraid of both pain and letting go. He was much more wary of the pharmacy than of a prescription he filled bimonthly out of the backpack of a 25-year-old trust fund kid who held court behind Jo-Ann’s Fabrics. Which may not have been logical, but that was how trauma worked.

“But you think a cop’s gonna arrest two white guys in a rich suburb for hotboxing? Hold on. Eddie. You’re going to let us hotbox your car?”

“It’s too fuckin’ cold out to smoke anywhere outside,” Eddie said, clicking on the interior light. He unscrewed the top and shook the container out into his lap. Then, he laid out a rolling paper on top of the console and tapped the leftover weed from his grinder onto it, “At worst, the smell’s gonna get into the carpet, but I’m tearing that out soon anyway.”

Better even than being high was getting high. He liked to roll his own joints because he could see what went into them. Sometimes he ground up lavender or spearmint from the farmer’s market instead. Without the heady side effects of weed, it stripped the act of breathing to its essential parts. Inhale. Exhale. A centrifugal force. “You have the right to choose what goes into your body,” said Dr. Trinh. Eddie pictured Richie wiggling his fingers at him and adding, “Hell yeah you do.”

Eddie fit a filter onto the end of the paper and rolled the joint together. “You better ash it in the cup holder,” he added. He licked the edge of the paper and squeezed it to the opposite edge, head still bent over the center console.

“Are you even allowed to do this? Like, am I enabling you?” Richie asked.

He knew he didn’t smoke particularly attractively; his body having carried over the action from a youth spent gripping a counterfeit inhaler. But the muscle memory of it was hard to shake, and the comfort it afforded still held immense appeal, so he made no attempt to temper himself, even now.

On the exhale, he turned his gaze back to Richie, whose eyes flitted away in response. He looked nervous, still hunched into the back of the seat, his arms crossed tight and high over his chest.

“It’s fine,” he said. “It’s uh, part of my treatment plan.”

Richie stared at him disbelievingly.

“Seriously. It’s harm reduction. If Jersey legalized, I’d have a medical card,” Eddie said. “I’m on methadone, plus this shitty East Coast weed to fill in the gaps.”

“I thought it was supposed to be a slippery slope.”

“That’s evangelical bullshit,” he griped, rolling his eyes.

He held the joint out. It was still lit, the ember burning precariously. The steady neon points of the dashboard were the only other sources of light in the car. Richie took it delicately, pinching the sagging middle between his thumb and index finger, two centimeters away from Eddie’s own fingers, splayed haphazardly over the curling edge of the thin paper.

“So how was it? Episode II: Rehab Strikes Back? Rehab: Back to Smack?” asked Richie.

“You know you don’t even need a medical license to run a rehab center in the state of California?” said Eddie obliquely.

Richie looked flustered. “You were in–”

“No, I was here, I haven’t been out there since – well...in a while. Just, as an example.”

“I just meant that a _lot_ of them are scams. They don’t actually treat you. Like Dr. Drew, you know?” Eddie sighed. “Smegma-faced piece of shit.”

“You got offered Dr. Drew?” Richie ventured. He twisted the joint back and forth between his thick Sausage King fingers before raising it to his lips.

“Yeah, fuckin’ bloodhounds.”

In 2002, Eddie had spent the proceeds from the sale of his dead mother’s house and his severance pay on a tony detox center in the Hamptons. The latter two were courtesy of Mike, whom he owed a blood debt to, seeing as it was his sheer likeability and professional-grade ability to spin a sob story with a three-act structure that had bestowed Eddie with a pink slip, rather than a restraining order. An incredible deal for someone who’d cursed out two network execs and told Jon Stewart to juggle a pair of donkey balls during dress on a Thursday.

So the severance was great.

Another side-effect of spinning out next to an Ivy-League pedigreed writers’ room was the existence of Mike’s freshman year roommate, an heir to an oil refinery fortune who had picked up an increasingly worrisome coke habit a few years back.

The rehab referral had more mixed results. On one hand, Eddie did get clean, officially speaking. Detox was hell, but it stuck better than the moralizing efforts of 12 Step meetings in the basement of First Presbyterian Church. He had a nutritionist and a therapist, and for two months, he didn’t have to go to work because _his job was getting clean_ , and so it was easily twice as attainable to do so than it had been previously.

On the other hand, he met Myra.

“I didn’t do rehab like you’re probably used to, is what I meant,” he told Richie now. “This time. Actually it’s not really healthy, or effective, for most people, to go cold turkey.”

“No, I get it. I’ve heard of methadone,” Richie said, looking sidelong at him. Eddie must have raised an end of an eyebrow, because he added defensively, “Really! I watch _60 Minutes_.”

Eddie definitely raised an eyebrow at that.

Richie shrugged. “What? I think Bob Simon is hot.”

Eddie gaped at him. Richie returned a sheepish smile, which Eddie was pretty sure meant he was only half-joking.

“I’m surprised Perez Hilton hasn’t found you out yet,” he remarked.

“I mean I haven’t given him much to work with the past few years.”

Eddie said, “You mean, you haven’t.” He watched as Richie took a slow pull, the proper, sexy, Clint-Eastwood-and-a-cigar way, his shoulders steadily sagging as he did it. “Since.”

Richie pursed his lips and blew out a plume of smoke. “Oh don’t flatter yourself. Mostly because you’re right. It’d be career suicide.” He kept the joint pressed to the tender inside of his bottom lip as he said it.

My mouth was on that, Eddie thought, like he was sixteen again and Matthew Clements was asking to drink from his water bottle at track practice because he’d forgotten his own at home.

“And I mean I do have sex with this Australian dude like, twice a year, but that’s been going on since oh, 2005,” Richie continued with a casual wave of his hand, “He’s not a total rando, he’s sorta surf-world famous, so he’s good for it.”

“Since 2005?”

“Well, off and on. He comes to LA for surf races or whatever.”

“He surfs?”

“Yeah.”

“Hmph,” Eddie grumbled. “If I lived by the beach I would too.”

“You’d be good at it,” Richie smirked. “You know, short,” he made a gesture that appeared to indicate Eddie’s height, patting down at the air in front of his chest, “Low center of gravity.”

They grinned at each other.

“Hey, um, sorry,” Richie said, “I never knew how to talk about that stuff.” He gestured again towards Eddie, meaning _drugs_ and not _sex_.

“I never wanted you to, before.”

“How are you, overall? Like, you feel good about it?”

“I do, Rich,” Eddie said, blinking. “Thanks,” he added softly.

They sat in silence for the length of a song, listening and breathing in the building cloak of smoke. Eddie couldn’t quite make out the words, which sounded less like English and more like one long, variable moan, punctuated with an occasional falsetto whine, but he liked the jangling beat of the guitar line. Its repetition made him a little dizzy, which was a sensation he had always been fascinated by, ever since he’d learned that all it took was twisting your own body around and around to change the way the entire world moved. 

“Can I ask you something?” he said when it ended.

Richie made a motion like he was starting up a lawnmower, which Eddie chose to interpret as a yes.

“What was that shit in your special?” he asked, not bothering to be careful about it. “Your old stuff wasn’t _bad_ ,” he continued, “Topic-wise, yeah, I could have done without half of the sex jokes, but it was always clever. Creative, you know, fun. I think about that three-parter about Blockbuster all the time, man. Like, I once tried to reverse-engineer it. Been trying to get my callbacks that smooth for years.”

Richie took another quick drag of the joint and then he waved it in the air like a conductor. Eddie followed it: down, left, right, up. _And-a-one, two, three, four._

“I didn’t write any of it. Well, I punched some of it up, but, the genesis of it all? The original sin? Out of my hands,” he said, fanning them out.

“I have this whole writing staff on the show, right? And I got the special _because_ of the show, because people like Toze OS, not Richie Tozier, not even the Trashmouth. So. Bada bing bada boom,” Richie said, surprisingly listlessly, with barely a suggestion of one of his variously effective impressions. “It made sense.”

“So you’re saying your shit sucked because you pulled a Carlos Mencia,” Eddie said.

“Hey, I pay people for their jokes!” Richie protested, “I’m more of an Andy Warhol. Henry Ford. You know, delegating. Innovating.”

“Oh, definitely,” Eddie agreed. “Labor violations and all.”

“I’m not, like, happy about it,” Richie admitted. He frowned. “It’s business. Supply and demand.”

“Well. I wish it was different,” said Eddie.

Richie shrugged about one-third-heartedly. “Yeah, Eds. Me too.”

The song had changed again. Now he was focusing on it and the voice sounded familiar, knocking against the hollow back of his head. _What do you have to say?_ it whined this time, and this was so on the nose that Eddie considered the possibility that he was hallucinating. He figured it was a sign either way. 

“Really, Richie,” he started again, and there were at least five different endings that could snap onto it. He let all of his jumbled-up words spin, roulette-style, until the first ones toppled out. It was being high, the kind of low-grade buzz he felt now, that shuffled around the order of events. Tonight was one long conversation, and so was every night together before that.

He remembered the first time he'd smoked, with Bev, before everything. Hands shaking and paranoid as they sat on a bench on the Brooklyn side of the East River, watched warily by all the skyscrapers jutting out into the skyline. He'd been enamored with her then, at how worldly and daring he found her. He envied how she seemed not to need anyone at all.

He found himself saying, “You’re a good friend. You call her every week, you text her all the time, you’re flying out to her. When she was here, I’d see her laughing at her phone and it was always some. You know. Some dumb shit you’d sent. You’re good at that. Getting people. Making them happy.”

It was Richie who knew how to cheer her up. The week after Tom left a message on Kay’s answering machine, Bev answered every one of Eddie’s suggestions for dinner with “Let’s get some shoes!” and her hyena laugh — the breezy affection she shared with Richie above all evident even from Eddie’s perch outside of the joke. Of course Eddie was resentful that it seemed to come so easy to him, whenever Bev cried and screamed that Eddie was suffocating her, that she didn’t need to be coddled.

But Bev was hurting and hurtful and still she tried to do better anyway. She bought fresh thyme to hang in the kitchen and made them mushroom risotto, and she told Eddie she was sorry, just like that, with no conditions.

Eddie was learning that care and conflict weren’t as diametric as he’d always believed. You had to be allowed to scream and cry and shout and, yes, even hate. Sometimes it cut you, but sometimes within those sometimes, it scabbed over. Then you peeled it off or let it fall away and underneath it was fresh skin, tender and pink.

It was important that Richie understood all this. Eddie couldn't tell you exactly why, in that moment, but it was important.

Richie himself was staring at Eddie. He seemed to have at least three questions stacked inside his mouth.

Eddie shook his head at him and closed his eyes. His mouth had gone barren so he could no longer vocalize any of it, but he tried to beam everything else telepathically into Richie’s brain. If he thought it at the same frequency as the plinking guitar, maybe it would drill its way through the lovely plane of his temple and lodge there, like an affectionate parasite.

* * *

The first time they’d kissed was eight months after the divorce. In Los Angeles with Stan and Ben, they’d come to some kind of truce, this no-man’s-land of familiarity between Eddie’s previous gloss of resentment and the genuine affection of friendship. By November of that year, Richie had parlayed a few successful CollegeHumor appearances into a shitty MTV hosting gig that ended up canceled before it went to air. It filmed in the Viacom building in Times Square, so he ended up house-swapping with Bill, who’d been living in Hell’s Kitchen for the past two years but wanted to try his hand at script doctoring out in LA. 

Bev was elated, and so then she, Mike, Eddie, and Richie were hanging out nearly every weekend. Eddie and Richie usually left together since they both lived along the same subway line. So then it was down to circumstance, and maybe inertia, and certainly time.

Myra had subscribed to the teetotaler model of recovery, refusing the both of them access to anything more potent than club soda, including all drugs, alcohol, fast food, and going to bed after 9 PM. This was despite the fact that the only things they were truly in danger of relapsing over were opioids. “Eddie,” she said, “You know how weak this disease makes you — makes us. I would hate to see you put your body in danger. All our hard work gone to waste.”

So he drank. He did two, three shows a night, and even when he didn’t, he still stayed out at clubs past midnight. He went to Papaya Dog and ordered corn dogs with relish that he regretted in the mornings, because he was vindictive, and self-sabotaging, and a bastard. He wanted to know he was hurting her, even if she wouldn’t know it herself. 

One night, they were all drunk, though Richie decidedly moreso, having lost count during a celebratory round of Jägerbombs after a particularly well-received Trashmouth set. Eddie volunteered to see him home, letting him sag his head on his shoulder and putting a steadying arm around his waist as they sat next to each other on an emptying A train.

At Bill’s apartment, he got Richie a glass of water and sat next to him on the couch while he drank it. He rubbed his back in slow circles, the way he always did with Bill, with Bev, with Mike, when they needed it.

“Hey, Rich, hey. Let me take those off so you don’t crush them,” he said, and reached forward to slide Richie’s glasses off the bridge of his nose. He crossed one arm over another and set them down next to the empty glass on the coffee table. “I’ll get you more water for when you wake up, too.”

When he turned back, Richie was sitting up again. Eddie patted him on the shoulder. “Hey, big guy. Lie back down. I’ll find you a blanket.”

He pushed off the couch to leave, but Richie caught his wrist and pulled him into his mouth. 

Richie kissed him like he was drowning, open-mouthed, slack-jawed, big noisy gulps wheezing through his chest. Eddie wasn’t sure if he’d even kissed back, just parting his lips so that Richie could gasp against his teeth. He couldn’t think clearly about anything, except, bizarrely, the D.A.R.E. presentations at school assemblies. Here was Trashmouth Tozier sticking his tongue down his throat, and Eddie thought to himself, _this is your brain on drugs._

When Richie came up for air, he scanned Eddie all over with his eyes dilated to needlepoint. He whispered _sorry_ under his breath, and promptly passed out.

It was fast, altogether no longer than a minute. Eddie felt something build up in his gut that he hadn’t expected, and when everything ended, it stayed there, a hard ball of want, like an ulcer.

The next day, Richie asked him if he‘d done anything weird the night before, his apology voice tinged violet with fear. Eddie turned on his biggest innocent blink and said no, just to watch the rigid line of Richie’s tensed shoulders deflate.

After that, he started noticing.

Weeks earlier, they’d taken to meeting for breakfast every day, because Eddie went for runs in Central Park and Richie passed by Majestic Deli on his way to work. Now, he started his routine ten minutes earlier so that Richie would have to stand there, holding the paper bag with the bagels he picked up in the mornings uselessly in one hand, and watch Eddie go through his post-run stretches, leg up on a bench and compression shorts riding up his thigh. He didn’t make eye contact with Richie while he did this because at that point he was still kind of a pussy, but he would sneak a casual glance up at him when he reached out for his bagel, plain, toasted, capers and one slice of lox. Richie always flushed, a tentative question across his brow that Eddie selfishly refused to answer.

He watched Richie brag about fucking co-eds on stage and then giggle and swat at Eddie’s chest when they went out for pizza afterwards, and he let himself look and linger on Richie’s broad chest and wide smile, the curl of his hair sticking with sweat on the nape of his neck, the exploratory spread of the back of his thighs and his ass. He noticed, too, that for quite some time now, it had been Eddie who called Richie up first to hang out, and Eddie who checked to see if Richie was laughing at his jokes, and Eddie who got up in Richie’s face, gesticulating intense and close, when they argued.

The other month, he and Bev had gone out for sushi, which was one of the new things he was trying that he liked the most. “You’re sending out mixed signals,” she’d said, at one point. Eddie had thought she’d been referring to the number of times he’d flagged down the waiter to change his order, but now upon reflection, he realized that the comment had come closer to the end of the meal, after some complaint or other about Richie.

He fell asleep nearly every night to the sense memory of the kiss. Sometimes he let himself imagine the both of them sober, grappling on Bill’s ratty old couch, Richie’s mythically big dick rocking up against his stomach.

Before and during Myra, Eddie had believed this was something you could just not cultivate. That’s what they taught in rehab: abstinence. Which didn’t work for the teen pregnancy crisis and didn’t work for the AIDS crisis and sure as hell didn’t work for the drug crisis. But Eddie thought, naively, that _homosexuality_ (he always imagined it in the threatening narration of a health class VHS tape) was something that he was uniquely positioned for success at staving off. First off, he was an anxious germaphobe and so by and large, a natural prude. Secondly, he had an ace up his sleeve, which was that he didn’t always have to pretend, with girls.

For most of his life, that knowledge had cradled him like a safety net while he read the rest of his desires from the inside out. He could chalk any hint of curiosity up to athletic interest or insecurity; he wished he was tall and naturally broad, he imagined himself with blonde hair, or a stronger chin, or elegant fingers. It wasn’t like there was anything wrong with him. He’d had his first kiss with a girl named Brenda when he was 19 and he’d liked it. Genuinely. Girls were often beautiful and smart and fascinating, and that had to be more than enough.

As he got older and more settled, more experienced, he could no longer ignore how the envy curdled deftly into what he now knew was lust. It was annoying, it was obtrusive, it was as insistent as a vestigial limb. But, see, there wasn’t anything _missing_. He simply had to cut it off. He could re-pledge and re-dedicate. He bought his first girlfriend flowers every week for a month. He said yes to every one of his aunt’s blind dates. He asked Myra to marry him. 

He was not going to give it time or space or oxygen. Let it choke out for all he cared.

Eddie’s mistake was that he had miscalculated his own capacity for diligence. Which was something that happened a lot. He’d spent years developing enough self-sufficiency to leave his mother’s house without the help she chased after him with, only to find himself back where he’d started as soon as shit went wheels-up.

It was abnegation that had gotten him into the mess with Ma, with Myra. It was studious, calculated risk that got him out. He watched Richie, who had more to lose, who still stared back. 

Richie had been asked to sub in for the regular MC at a cabaret show, and Eddie stopped by the green room, which was really just a section of the basement cordoned off by a wooden screen and a shower curtain, to wish him luck. “I don’t know why I’m so nervous,” Richie said, pausing his pacing to greet Eddie with a bashful smile, “This is just the first time I’ve done anything like this.”

Eddie was a planner, sure, but truly effective planning required the sensibility of an opportunist. At some point, you had to put your chips in and make the bet.

* * *

In the end, Eddie brought him to the garage.

It was just one strip mall over from where they’d been parked last, so he couldn’t really lie to himself about the spontaneity of it, but thankfully Richie didn’t seem to notice. He was circling the floor, not bothering to hide the sheen of awe on his face. Eddie leaned his hip against a workbench. He felt more than a little smug.

“So, uh, the guy you’re seeing,” Richie said, clearly practiced, “You meet him at work? He ask you to rev his engine? Pump your fuel? Brake your fluid? Spark your plug? Muffle your–”

Eddie was laughing. “Shut up, Rich, we get it.”

“Oh good, because I didn’t know where that last one was going.”

He watched as Richie peered into the window of the Cadillac Kay was working on. Eddie turned on one of the overhead infrared heaters. He shed his overcoat, draping it on the bench, and walked over to stand near him.

“Anyways, there’s no guy,” he said once he was close.

Richie straightened up too fast and nearly stumbled on the come-up. Eddie braced his hands behind his back so as not to reach out. It was also a near thing. “You broke up?” Richie asked.

“You’re talking about the one in the article?”

“Yeah, we established that I read it,” Richie scowled.

“That guy was fake. I mean I did date someone pretty seriously last year, but no,” Eddie said. He propped an elbow on top of the side mirror and tried to channel his posture into a Travolta-esque slouch. It didn’t work because Kay hadn’t screwed the mirror on completely and Eddie’s elbow spun and fell off. He caught himself with a hand pressed up to the window and tried again to look suave. “Uh,” he said, “Yeah. The boyfriend in the article’s not real.”

Richie’s crow’s feet crinkled but he didn’t say anything about the slip.

“So why the fake BF?” he asked, dragging it out as _beeee_ and _effffff_. “Wait!” he continued, mock-appalled, “Is this, like, a beard thing? Are you actually straight? Is he your...toupee?”

Eddie snorted.

Adrian, who’d never once hidden himself (“a luxury,” he’d called it, in the way Eddie read correctly as arch, and later, more correctly, as wounded) — and Eddie, who, for all his grandstanding, took weeks to hold his hand without looking over his shoulder. Adrian saying to him acerbically, “You’re not better than anyone just because you don’t have a gay voice, asshole.”

That was why the people who had called him and told him how brave he was for doing the interview had no idea what they were talking about. One delayed moment of lucidity meant so little in the face of a decade of silence and strained smiles at anecdotes that hinged on the word “faggot” as fulcrum. That was aiding and abetting, certainly nothing to be proud of.

“It is brave,” Dr. Trinh said, “But it’s not any braver than anything else you do when you wake up, when you decide to stay sober, when you call your friends to catch up, when you put care and effort into the job you enjoy. It’s not exceptional within the number of brave things you choose to do every single day.”

How brave was it to ask to live and not just to survive?

He picked a stray lug nut off the hood of the car and threw it at Richie. It bounced off of his shoulder. The muscle there twitched in reflex. “The PR people said it was a good way to come out,” Eddie said, staring unabashedly at it, “Apparently people don’t ask a ton of follow-up questions if you put it in this upward trajectory. Nice, positive narrative, like oh, he’s sober and bought a house and he’s even in a happy relationship.”

“Like a normal person,” Richie said.

“Like a normal person,” Eddie echoed, nodding.

“Bet it’s less threatening too. Monogamy. Heteronormal or whatever it’s called.” Richie affected a faux-deep frat boy voice, Alpha Epsilon Treasurer Drew Caufrey-Jones, “Don’t worry bros, _this_ scary homo’s locked down. He’s not gonna try to suck _your_ dick.”

Eddie raised his eyebrows. “Is that how _you_ read it?”

Richie blushed. He coughed, and then said casually, “You bought that house?”

“No, man, I’m renting,” Eddie replied.

He crossed the space to stand instead next to the ‘65 Corvette. Richie had been eying it when they’d first walked in. Eddie didn’t blame him. He’d painted it bright red, catnip to the middle-aged-crisis market. Eddie ran a hand along the top of the windshield placatingly. Richie’s gaze dropped. 

“Wanna get in?” Eddie called out.

“Is this not, like, a client car? Are you allowed to do this?” Richie asked, but he was walking over and opening the driver-side door anyway.

“Some of them are, yeah, some are technically mine right now. You buy ‘em cheap, restore ‘em, sell high.”

“Oh, like house-flippers.”

“Yeah, car-flippers,” said Eddie, sliding into the passenger seat.

Richie ran his hands over the wheel. “I feel like a segregationist sitting in here. By golly, am I looking forward to the sock hop and the draft!”

Eddie choked and smacked him lightly on the shoulder. Richie furrowed his brow a little and threw a diagonal glance down at the spot where he’d made contact.

Eddie was running a very offense-heavy game here, but Richie had yet to call any fouls.

“So what did happen with the person you dated? You get dumped?”

“It was mutual,” Eddie said idly.

He watched Richie one-hand the gearshift, palm circling over the head.

“Nah, even when they need to happen, they suck. That’s universally accepted.”

“Adrian and I are still friends.”

“Oh, Adrian, right. What a nice, gender-neutral name.”

“ _He_ and _his boyfriend_ just moved in together.”

“Congrats to them,” Richie replied. “And this was in — where the fuck are we again?”

“Paramus. Well, they moved to Paterson. I went to their housewarming.”

“Oh, I bet you warmed their house, alright,” he said, almost as an afterthought.

Eddie didn’t say anything, which was exactly like answering the question.

“Wait. You had a threesome?” Richie’s face went slack and open, stuck-out tongue and slide whistle implied. “Fuck, Eddie, that’s really hot.”

It had been just okay, actually, too many limbs at first, and then Don fucking Adrian possessively while Eddie jerked off on the other side of the bed.

“Is it?”

“Yeah I mean, objectively,” Richie said, recovering somewhat. He ran a hand through his hair and looked shiftily around, his eyes landing everywhere but on Eddie. “I watch a lot of porn, dude. Threesomes are hot,” he rambled, “The internet, it’s a marvel.”

“Hm,” said Eddie, considering. “You ever had one, Rich?”

Richie froze, his hand still caught in his hair.

There was that Pavlovian response again. Eddie felt it glaze over and build up. It had been sliding its way onto the table all night. He released the brake.

“You’d probably want to be filled up from both ends huh?” he said, quiet. “One guy in your mouth, one in your ass, both of them jacking you off together.”

The fantasy came smooth and easy. Richie always made him like that: past the point of holding it in.

“Unless you’ve changed, Rich? That’d be okay too. Tastes change all the time. I bottomed a few times with Adrian, you know? I hadn’t before. I never did with you. I thought about it when he fucked me, though. I’m pretty sure your dick is bigger than his. I think it would have felt good.”

That very first time, Richie had stood slack-jawed as Eddie advanced on him, wide-eyed the whole time they touched. Eddie hadn't kissed him until the very end, mouth curved in a lazy pucker. Richie had begged him for that, for the very first time too, saying _please_ and cradling the side his cheek. He must have been smiling, because he remembered, somehow, the feel of Richie's thumb pressing gently into a dimple.

“You’re such an asshole,” he heard Richie spit out. “Fucking – lay off it for a second, will you.”

Eddie looked at him now and his face was contorted with lines of anger and hurt. “Shit,” he said, suddenly chagrined. He recoiled into the side of the car. “Fuck. I’m sorry. I’m making you uncomfortable.”

“I’ll -” he made to open the door and step out, “This wasn’t - appropriate of me. I’ll drive you to mine and you can sleep in the guest bedroom for a few hours still. I promise I won’t-” He pulled on the door handle. He really was an impulsive asshole who couldn’t leave well enough alone, wasn’t he.

Richie stopped him with a tentative hand to his shoulder.

“You weren’t jealous?” he asked.

“I-” Eddie began. He didn’t dare turn around.

“I don’t think I could do it,” Richie said, assessing. His hand drifted down, down Eddie's back. 

“It’s narcissistic, I know. I gotta whole show named after me and I’m still. Too insecure, I guess. I want to think that I’m special,” he said bitterly, twisting the last word into mocking lilt.

Eddie spun to face him. How couldn’t he know? All this time and he still didn’t know. “No, you deserve it,” said Eddie, “You deserve to know you are.”

He pulled back again and Richie caught him a second time, just the tap of his thumb on Eddie’s wrist. Eddie stilled and looked down at it.

“This is a terrible idea,” said Richie.

“Uh-huh,” Eddie nodded. He didn’t move but his heart was pummeling at breakneck speed.

“No, I mean it. This is a terrible idea,” Richie muttered, inching closer. His lips seemed to hover, hummingbird-like, tantalizingly close. Eddie could do nothing but strain imperceptibly to match his gaze, stretching out a stamen brimming with nectar, asking him to taste. “But we already crossed the threshold. I did it. You did it. If I go home tomorrow and we didn’t fuck, I’m gonna feel just as shitty about myself as if we do.”

“Richie,” Eddie whined.

And finally he was leaning over and pressing his mouth to Eddie’s. The rough pucker of his lips live and real and nothing at all like a memory. Richie bit down violently onto Eddie’s lower lip and sucked it into his mouth. He scrubbed the pointed tip of his tongue against his teeth and the inside of his cheeks, devouring and devotional.

The frame of his glasses dug into the top of Eddie’s cheek, so he brought a hand up to push them up to the top of Richie’s head. While he was there, he took a second to pull at a few of his curls, earning a swallowed whine and the sudden feel of Richie’s body sagging minutely under his hold.

He shoved his hands up from where they were planted on the center console and swung up and over until he was sitting in Richie’s lap, a knee on either side of his thighs, their cocks straining and aligned. Their hands scrabbled over each other’s belts, Eddie trying to focus on weaving the prong out of the buckle while Richie bit at his chin. He finally got it loose and Richie wiggled his hips to help him pull the rest of the material down.

Eddie raised up, ass in the air, so Richie could yank Eddie’s own pants down. 

“Are you wearing _long underwear_?” he hissed.

“It’s 25 degrees out, you’re supposed to layer,” Eddie snapped, and then Richie’s hand was heavy and burning over him like a brand.

His wide palm enclosed both of their cocks and he began to stroke over them at a punishing pace. They were so close, chest flattened against chest, mouths still attached. All the nerve endings on his crotch alight. Eddie layered his hand over his, rubbing at the skin over Richie’s head and tucking it down. They moved in concert over and over. He could feel the pads of Richie’s fingers clutching at his skin, the rough sandpaper of his tongue flicking in and out of his mouth. His other hand circled around to cradle Eddie’s ass and squeezed.

“Fuck,” Eddie heaved, still mouthing at Richie’s stubble.

Richie knocked his head back with his chin and scraped his jaw over the skin below Eddie's lip, rubbing it raw.

“Yeah, fucking, come for me Eds, come for me,” he mumbled into his forehead, licking at it.

His dick twitched underneath both of their hands and Eddie entwined his fingers with Richie’s to grip and feel the thin, pulsing skin of them both with his own. The slick heat of it all like plunging headfirst into a cloud of exhaust.

It was like a vice, like turning a hose clamp. So tight and ready to burst.

“Please, Eds,” said Richie. His eyes were closed and his hair was matted over his forehead. There was drying spit at the corner of his lip. He kneaded Eddie’s ass and clutched at the side of his hip. “Please.”

Eddie came, gasping, with a hand clasped in the collar of Richie’s sweater. He was barely conscious when he felt Richie spill over too, their cum leaking and blending together under their still-joined hands.

Eddie slumped down with his face mashed into Richie’s chest and fucked his hips forward a few last times as the aftershocks wore off. Richie’s hands went to his armpits to keep him from sliding all the way off his lap. “Fucking hell,” he heard him say, before his eyelids fell heavy and shuttered and he wandered off into a dreamless sleep.

* * *

There was sunlight streaming into the break room when Eddie got up to turn on the percolator. He let it run as he peeled off his sweater, wrinkled and stained with cum, and dropped it into a plastic bag he stashed into the corner of his office. He had a few plain t-shirts he changed into while at work and so he put one on instead, which was a quick fix, if a foreseeably cold one. He went back to the break room to pour out two cups of coffee and brought them back to the car. 

Richie was sprawled parallel over the leather seats with one door open so his legs extended fully out.

“C’mon,” Eddie said, kicking his ankle, “Time to go.”

“Mmmm,” Richie groaned. He muttered something incoherent.

Eddie kicked him again.

“We were only asleep for like 90 minutes, get over it.”

“Oh god, I was only asleep for 90 minutes,” Richie repeated. He put a hand over the side of his face and pulled the skin down.

“You’re gonna give yourself wrinkles,” said Eddie. He pulled Richie’s wrist back and then dropped it just as quickly.

“Why are we leaving so early?” Richie snuffled and held out the _y_. “My flight’s not for hours.”

“Oh you wanna go back in time to stop 9/11?” Eddie said, annoyed. “Be my guest.”

“Hmph,” said Richie, “This is why I never asked you to drive me to the airport.” He reddened and shut up, then, because they both knew that wasn’t why.

“You can sleep on the plane,” Eddie said. With his other hand, he thrust the coffee mug in front of Richie’s face. Kay’s kid had made it in school years ago, so the rim was sort of deformed and it had a Japanese cartoon character that Eddie didn’t recognize painted on it.

Richie turned the mug over. He blinked blearily. “Is this Inuyasha?” he asked.

Eddie looked at him blankly. “It’s coffee,” he replied.

Richie laughed, a kind of half-chortle that got stuck in his throat. He coughed violently to dislodge it and the coffee sloshed around precariously. Then he took a big gulp of coffee that clearly burned his mouth, sitting up with a shock and a strangled gasp.

Eddie darted forward to get a hold of the mug, so that Richie wouldn’t upend it all over himself. 

Richie was panting with a hand fluttering close to his mouth. “Ah-ah-ah, shit,” he said, but at least now he was fully awake.

“Ugh, I’m gonna change my boxers.” He looked down at Eddie’s. “You want a pair too?”

Eddie made a face, probably, so Richie kept going. “Relax, they’re clean. Although, it wouldn’t matter, would it? Seeing as we’ve recently crossed swords.”

He stood up and stretched, winking when he saw Eddie’s gaze catch across his chest. Richie stepped closer and said, “It’s kinda hot though, right? Think about it. You jerk off in them and mail them back to me. I jerk off in them and mail them back to you. Sisterhood of the traveling cumrags.”

Eddie rolled his eyes and turned away, the _ew Richie, you’re so gross_ presupposed. Everything about Richie turned Eddie into a teenage girl, which he used to assume was a bad thing.

He took the car he actually drove, a 2008 Audi A4, partly because it was good on ice — though they had probably brined all the roads by now — so mostly in order to show off. 

It was a lot of luxury that he’d been granting himself, enough allowances to last a lifetime. 

Twenty minutes later, they were sitting at pump three, waiting for the attendant to come back. 

“Eddie, I–” Richie started.

“I’m not going to let you blow up your life and then resent me for it,” Eddie said before he could finish. “Whatever scenario you had in mind, it’s not worth it. You’re still not out and you live across the country and you’re genuinely famous now, we can’t just fuck around like we—”

“Oh, I had a scenario?” Richie interjected.

Suddenly it crossed his mind for the first time since he’d woken up, cupped alongside Richie’s beating chest. Eddie blanched. “Shit. If you didn’t - that’s - that’s fine too. I get it,” he took a deep breath, “Shit. You were right. I shouldn’t have. I wasn’t respecting your boundaries. 

“Eddie,” Richie repeated. He asked calmly, “Did you think it was a mistake?”

“No,” Eddie exhaled. “I’m glad I saw you.”

“You were seducing me, Eds.” Richie grinned. “I was pissed about it all night. I should still be pissed about it, but.” He looked Eddie in the eye.

“But,” Eddie mouthed back softly.

“I missed you,” Richie said. Eddie watched his Adam’s apple float up, sink down. He imagined bobbing for it. Face-first over a big, barrel chest, nose dipping into a pool of sweat, unhinging his jaw and closing the tips of his canines carefully around shiny red skin. Straightening up at the waist with arms locked like a good boy behind his back, teeth still clasped, jaw tidy. 

_I missed you_ , Richie said, like it was that easy. 

He didn’t know what to say back. “Me too,” is what came out.

“I want –” Richie said, and he looked so young, his forehead slack and his mouth dropped open. Eddie had no poker face, but Richie had a poker face and not much else, so that, in the extraordinary conditions under which he dropped it, it hit you retroactively, like twenty or so pounds of drag force.

“Do you think we could be friends again? I – for what it’s worth, I always, ah, missed that. Being friends with you.”

“How would we –” Eddie began.

Richie filled in eagerly. “We could text? You can unblock me on Facebook?”

Eddie shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” and Richie looked hurt, so he continued, against his better judgement, “We’d start sexting immediately.”

“You know about sexting?”

“We used to have phone sex all the time,” Eddie said, and then reddened.

“Yeah, but sexting! I’d have thought you were worried about someone stealing your nudes,” Richie exclaimed. “You did mean nudes, right?”

Eddie scowled. “I would never mean that.”

“Fuck, are you sure?” He looked Eddie up and down, gaze growing heated. “Like, _I_ hate taking them. I can never fit myself into frame,” he said, wiggling his arms and legs, “But you,” Richie actually licked his lips here, an exaggerated sweep of his tongue, shiny and slick. “You’re so tight and compact, you know? You are _just right._ ”

Eddie blushed. “Fuck off, Hornilocks. I meant, like, dirty talk.”

“Oh, the crown prince of audio erotica. How could I forget!”

Richie had a wide grin plastered on his face and he matched the upturned corners of it with a lurching squint. It was meant to be seductive, it made him look something like a distended frog, and Eddie found it sexy anyway.

“Richie. You know this. We couldn’t even spend like, five hours together before fucking just now.” Eddie sighed and looked away. “We can’t just be friends when we both want more.”

“You’re still no fun when I want you to be.”

Eddie didn’t respond to that.

“Okay, so what if I did?” Richie tried, “Blow it up?”

“Life’s not a fairytale, Rich.”

“But why not?” he said, with a cliff’s edge of beseechment. “I’m Ariel. You’re the prince. I’ll give up my voice. I’ll come to the surface. We can, uh, we can live in a castle. You can teach me to use a fork.”

“It’s not giving something up. It’s supposed to be additive,” Eddie said, “You have to do it for yourself.” He didn’t make eye contact, saying that back, because there were a lot of things that hadn’t changed, and maybe he was still a coward, after all.

There was a long pause. Eddie stared stubbornly out the windshield, watching a mother hustle two young children out of the convenience store. They wandered off in two separate directions into the parking lot, and she raised her arms up in exasperation, accidentally echoing the spread wings of the goose in the Wawa logo.

Finally he heard Richie flop back against the passenger seat with a deep groan. “Where the fuck is the gas pumper guy?” he said.

“God, this is the worst thing about New Jersey,” Eddie complained. “He’s probably jerking off into a tank, or like, shaking down a Chuck-E-Cheese. Vito-ass son of a bitch.”

“Of course you’d pick Vito for your Sopranos reference, you Freudian motherfucker.” 

They sat there for another few minutes, Richie with his shoes on the dash, threading his fingers through the bunny ear loop of his laces. The attendant really was nowhere to be found. “Put your feet down, fuckwad. Let’s go get some Twizzlers,” Eddie declared. He swatted at Richie’s exposed ankle.

“Twizzlers?” Richie gasped, in a Southern Belle voice, three syllables, _twiz-ah-lahs_. “Of course you like licorice, you fuckin’ _grandma_.”

Eddie said, “Yeah, Twizzlers. They remind me of your freaky Slender Man body,” and got out of the car.

“Makes sense you wanna stick them in your mouth, then,” Richie said, following.

In the candy aisle, Richie whipped a Nerds rope around and around like a lasso. Eddie hissed at him. “You’re going to break it.”

“Yeah, and if I break it, you buy it,” Richie said innocently. He grasped the other end of the rope and made it do the worm.

Eddie whacked him in the bicep. “You’re going to get recognized.”

Richie made a show of looking around. His eyes landed very pointedly on the cashier, who was the only other person in the store and reading a Bengali newspaper.

Eddie huffed. “Well, I don’t know what your demographics are.”

“Honestly, of the two of us, I think he’s more likely to recognize you,” said Richie. He slapped Eddie lightly with the end of the Nerds rope. “C’mon, you know you’re like, inexplicably popular with old immigrant dudes.”

Eddie frowned at him.

“Well, maybe not inexplicable. All the yelling.” Richie circled his hand in a scrubbing motion, haloing around Eddie’s sour expression. “See this? Explains itself, really.”

Eddie decided to ignore him, as you did a young child. He turned back to the gummy worms.

Richie slipped his hand into Eddie’s back pocket.

“Rich,” Eddie started, eyes darting around the aisle.

He looked over his shoulder, Richie with a wobbly smile squirming over the steady line of his jaw. Eddie knew that look. It was _yes, and_. It was _commit to the bit_.

Eddie was a terrible scene partner. He didn’t often think about what he wanted when it involved other people, because it was always so much more unobtainable that way. It was an arduous process, to negotiate your needs alongside someone else’s. That was one of the perks of stand-up, that it so rarely required collaboration. You went up under the lights to say your piece and then you left.

He was trying, though. He was learning. The image of himself he had accommodated for years was no more true now than it had ever been. It was just an image. He was here, and he was a flesh and blood man, and another flesh and blood man was reaching out, warmth on warmth.

So he pressed minutely back into the chest. The sides of their hands brushed together. Richie caught his pinky with his own and linked them together. Bait; hook; line of his long arm slotted solid and warm along Eddie’s spine. _He could cast me anywhere_ , Eddie thought deliriously. _I think I would follow._

They paid for the Twizzlers, a bag of Sour Patch kids, and a pair of clementines that Eddie insisted Richie eat before he boarded, because Vitamin C was good for your immune system and there were all kinds of airborne diseases you could catch on a plane. Richie hovered behind him, hooking his chin over the far side of Eddie’s shoulder.

When they walked outside, Richie put a hand on the small of his back, above his waist, and it didn’t part until they reached the car again. Eddie took the hand not holding the snacks out of his coat pocket. He fumbled into his pants for the keys.

He looked up and Richie was staring at him.

“I think I loved you, then,” Richie told him, over the roof of the car, “I think I could again.” His mouth parted wantonly over the last word, like it was remembering the taste of something sweet.

* * *

There was that old George Carlin bit about time.

_There’s no time. We made it up. It’s a man-made invention, time. There are no numbers up in the sky. I’ve looked. They’re not there. We made this stuff up. When is it? When the hell is it, when are we, I ask you, when are we?_

Richie said “then” and he said “again,” as if anything meant anything.

“Recovery is not linear,” said Dr. Trinh, every session.

_Give you an example, there’s a moment coming. It’s not here yet, it’s still on the way, it’s in the future, it hasn’t arrived, here it comes, here it is, oh, shit, it’s gone. There’s no now, there’s no now, everything is the near future or the recent past. But there’s no present. Welcome to the present, whoosh, gone again. It’s just so imprecise._

How a person felt — and Eddie would know since he was supposed to keep a mood journal, now — on a day-to-day basis was best quantifiable as a piecewise function. There would be one part angled up, and one curving down, a tall, vertical gap between them, starting and stopping and starting again, and still, they would be part of the same whole. Different functions depending on the input. You could put in three and get four, and put in five and get four, again. One day it would be rainy out and so you’d be anxious over whether or not you’d parked that i-banker’s convertible in the garage, but the next day it’d be sunny, plus you’d read an article about rising tuberculosis rates in Eastern Europe, which meant you were anxious again. (This worked out, mathematically speaking, because there were fewer feelings you could have in response than there were possible events in the world.)

Therefore, on the face of it, Eddie understood that a feeling “then” did not preclude it happening “again.” He didn’t know the function, but it was possible that the function could know him.

_Of course, you can’t tell time, time tells you._

The last time he had seen her, Bev had hugged Edde, Mike, and Kay close before the security gate. “I love you, Eddie,” she’d whispered into the hollow of his neck, “You are loved.”

Eddie was, historically, terrified of people who handed their _I love you_ s out like candy, having once believed only in the debilitating sanctity of its form. He had been taught familial devotion, had attempted romantic devotion, had only said “I love you” to two people in his life. He wouldn’t lie and say he hadn’t meant it; he couldn’t lie and say they hadn’t either.

His mother used to tell him, _No one will ever be able to love you like I do._ Myra said to him, _You’re my whole world_. It turned out you weren’t really supposed to believe that. It turned out there wasn’t much to do in a world with only one other person.

Richie and Bev said “I love you” to each other every time they talked on the phone. Eddie knew this because, against his better judgement, he’d strain to hear when Bev took his calls from the other room. On some lucky occasions he’d hear the tinny echo of Richie’s laugh. And always Bev saying, _Love you too, Rich!_ or _Love you, have a good show tonight!_ or _Yeah, you little bitch, I love you back._

At the airport, before she left for Atlanta, after she told him “I love you,” Eddie put his face onto the top of Bev’s head and said, “I love you” into her hair. As soon as it fell from his mouth, he felt a surfacing sense of shame. Like he’d undressed too early in the locker room and now everyone could see the soft flesh of his underbelly. “I’m really glad we’re friends,” he tacked on as he pulled away, holding it up like a towel to his waist. Bev smiled and squeezed his hand. 

He was learning that loving someone wasn’t a discrete phenomenon.

At the airport, before he left for Atlanta, Richie hiked his carryon up onto his shoulder. He stood three feet away from Eddie at the curbside dropoff and he said, “Listen. It’s no pressure. I just wanted to say that. I wanted to show you that I could.”

Eddie wasn’t brave enough just yet, but Richie made him feel like, one day, he could be. He crossed the gap and touched his arm, and held him close, and breathed him in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here are a couple of resources to seek support for [opioid abuse or addiction](https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/national-helpline) for yourself or loved ones.
> 
> [George Carlin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaR3sVpTB98&ab_channel=jewtube520) on time
> 
> R.E.M.'s [Fables of the Reconstruction](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eNljSR-U0Y&list=PLDZmtI4GBWqyhbjYM_xm_NT1ZAvwPFaOv)
> 
> content warnings:  
> \- discussion of eddie's past opioid addiction with a focus on recovery and management, including the use of medication-assisted treatment, marijuana, and cognitive behavioral therapy  
> \- discussion of bev's abusive marriage with tom  
> \- references to eddie's abusive marriage with myra  
> \- richie and eddie smoke weed together  
> \- discussion of eddie's internalized biphobia and homophobia  
> \- suggestive references to past consensual rough sex that involves choking


	3. Page, Arizona: 2013

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie and Eddie go on vacation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Endless gratitude to anyone who’s been patiently following. So sorry for the massive delay between this part and the last!
> 
> See chapter end notes for detailed content warnings.

At LAX, Richie had been standing in line for a peanut butter moo’d and two strawberry surf riders, outfitted in his don’t-talk-to-me-I’m-famous cap and shades (the Groucho glasses of anyone who might find themselves in a copy of inTouch by the register of a Hudson News), when someone decided to go ahead and break the illusion.

“It really, it meant a lot to me when you came out,” they’d said, thumbing the rainbow patch on the strap of a little rectangular backpack with a fox logo printed on it. The kid had on glasses too, big clear round ones, and Richie could see right through them, to their eyes scrunched up and filming with tears. Which was always impossible to react to in a normal way. 

Richie had landed on something like, “Oh, hey, yeah, happy to help,” and they had beamed at him and tried to invite him to a college improv show. 

Getting recognized had a domino effect that was always compounded at vectors of travel. One person asked for a selfie and either he said yes and that drew the lay people in so that he had to take even more selfies, like a recursive flock of seagulls crowding around a stale piece of bread. Or he said no and then the person kicked up enough of a fuss that everyone ended up watching anyway, but this time they went home and called him an asshole on the Internet. Whatever. Maybe his main purpose in life was to fulfill other people’s storytelling needs. _Oh, LA was fantastic. The Asian food was to die for. We even met a celebrity!_

It was fine, really. That was the devil’s bargain of a Wikipedia page with your face on it. When you put yourself up for display like that, you were pretty much giving your soul up to the public domain. People made YouTube edits of your weird breathing patterns and you were meant to be grateful, because you were lucky enough to have achieved the very apex of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: so self-actualized that, at most times, in one or another far-flung location, a person you’d never seen before was pointing your face out on a bargain-bin DVD cover and saying “yeah, that’s the guy. I think he was in _Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2_.”

So he took a few more photos, cheesing next to a pair of French families and a Girl Scout troop from Ohio that clearly knew jackshit about any of his work, and then made a big show of checking his watch until it was safe enough to back up and slide his sunglasses back on, muttering departure time excuses under his breath.

All things considered, he’d gotten off easy this time. More than once, some kid with an undercut had yelled at him in a Ralphs parking lot. He could tell they weren’t really afraid of him, when that happened. Getting heckled out in the wild had never been an issue when he’d been calling women fugly cumslots regularly and without plausible deniability. Now it happened while he was draining the blood money from his first two albums into shelters and DV intervention programs. To be clear, he was happy to — no cookie needed. But he knew it was only because he had finally exhibited a shred of humanity-laden remorse that he was now being asked to confront his karmic debts. He was publicly a good guy, whatever that meant, and he found himself accountable to the theoretical prompt of “the LGBTQ community,” whomever that meant. Apparently the two went hand in hand, being gay and being good, even though Richie knew there were plenty of gay serial killers and studio execs. Eddie said it was because people liked a perfect victim. You couldn’t really be said to suffer unless you didn’t deserve it.

When he got back to the gate, Stan and Patty were doing a crossword. They didn’t look up as he handed them their drinks, so he dropped heavy into the seat across from them, sighing dramatically and letting his thighs hit the metal edge with a loud smack.

“What’s wrong, kiddo?” Patty asked. She reached across the space to pat Richie gently on one stretched-out knee. “You nervous?”

Richie scowled. He was, but he wasn’t going to say it.

“I hate these tourist bitches,” he said instead.

“Seven-letter word for respecting women,” scolded Stan, still not looking up. Easy for him to say. Stan was a stay-at-home dad who recorded a comedy album in his basement once every two years and set as the cover a shitty finger painting his daughter had made. Nobody knew what he looked like anymore, let alone recognized his hot wife, a normal person who taught kindergarten at a Montessori school in Eagle Rock.

“My bad,” Richie said, bitchily, “I hate these tourist cunties.” He counted the letters on his fingers as he said it and then raised them up as proof.

Patty shook her head. “Sorry, Rich,” she said. She took a big slurp of her smoothie. “Sucking cock doesn’t make you a feminist.”

When they touched down in Flagstaff, Mike and Eddie picked them up in a rented Subaru — Mike because he said he couldn’t stand to not see them for a minute longer, and Eddie because Mike had not driven a car once in the past two years that he’d spent in Europe. Someone like Bev would have put up a fight and called Eddie a type-A gearhead or something more or less cutting, but Mike usually enjoyed it when people did things for him. Richie would have let Eddie do it for him too, but that was because Richie let Eddie do most anything for, or to, him, and this was now an openly-acknowledged, open-faced, open-ended fact amongst all of their friends.

Mike wrapped him up in a big bear hug as soon as he was in reaching distance. Richie let him. Because he’d missed him! Because he craved human touch. He let go and Mike was beaming at him, shaking him by the shoulders. “Richie!” he shouted, “You look great! You look really handsome!” Mike didn’t shout with volume but with unabashed affection, like a kitten yowling and batting at your nose with its paws. His breath smelled like Chex Mix. Richie gripped Mike at the elbows and gave him the deep, serious look that men were allowed to exchange before they marched into battle. “I really missed you, dude,” he said, “You look great too.”

Mike laughed. He put his hands back on Richie’s shoulders and pivoted him three-quarters to the right. “Okay, now say hi to Eddie!” he exclaimed.

Eddie himself looked appropriately handsome for an afternoon airport reception, enough that Richie’s chest went through that aching little swish-dip that he’d always poorly suppressed around him. Eddie’s hair was slicked back and his shirt was tucked in at the waist, looking every bit the sexy single dad that Richie would have tried to hit on in the carpool line.

He was wearing a shirt Richie had bought him on a lark, one day wandering down Rodeo Drive because his agent had a thing for the hostess at Spago. He’d been killing time in the Ralph Lauren, wafting a hand over standing racks of starched oxfords as the salespeople eyed him warily, when he’d suddenly been struck by the image of Eddie two weeks earlier, wrapping his arms around Richie’s chest and kissing him goodbye in his sun-dappled kitchen. Richie had hugged him back, his nails pushing up the thin cotton of Eddie’s button-up, inhaling the cinnamon scent of Eddie’s cologne. Just another swell addition to their long line of melodramatic long-distance farewells.

So the shirts on display next to the bottles of Polo Eau de Parfum reminded him of Eddie. That wasn’t new. Most things reminded him of Eddie. This had been true for a long time now, probably ever since he was 25 and sticking his dick into a pickle jar for his buddy’s short film, thinking, _I bet Bev’s friend Eddie would lose his shit if he found out about this._

But Richie was 36 now, and he was leaning into it. When things reminded him of Eddie, it made them better than they would have been on their own. It was the same principle that underpinned a really memorable impression. The appeal of Robin Williams as Pacino was nearly as much Robin Williams as it was Pacino. Sometimes it felt like the whole world was in the midst of a perpetual Eddie Kaspbrak impression, with how often Richie thrilled with recognition. Most likely that was because Richie walked around wanting to be impressed.

At the store, Richie skipped over the first shirt that had caught his eye, since he thought it looked too gay. The cashier was wrapping up a different one when he realized how fucked up that probably was, so he’d doubled back to switch it out, and then he left the store and worried over it again, all _maybe Eddie will think I think he’s feminine_ , or _maybe Eddie just hates purple_ , or _maybe I hate purple and I’m overcompensating_. 

Richie was always overcompensating. But he figured it was an okay problem to have. Over was better than under, when you were dealing with injury and loss.

In the Southwest terminal, Eddie was wearing a lavender button-up that Richie had bought for him because he thought he would like it and look good in it.

Eddie did. Look good in it. His arms filled out the sleeves. The collar laid complementary against the olive undertones of his skin. “Hi, Rich,” he said shyly. He had a wry kind of half-smile on and he was doing that coquettish thing where he flicked his eyes up at Richie before he lowered his lashes and pressed his lips together as if to hold back a private smirk. Eddie loved to pretend that he had no awareness of his considerably detailed physicality, and yet that move in particular had been driving Richie to the absolute brink for years.

Richie put his hand up, feeling like a very young child. He bent down the tips of his fingers in a semblance of a wave and said, “Hi, Eds.”

Eddie let the smirk leak back out of his mouth and held out his arm to take Richie’s duffel. Their fingers brushed. Richie could have self-immolated there at baggage claim, all the anticipation and affection he’d been holding inside breached by a single kiss of living skin.

They got to the rental, one of those cookie-cutter vacation homes with tiled floors and estate sale art on the walls. It had a wraparound porch and a fire pit in the backyard. For some reason, Mike wanted to show him where the firewood was, so Richie followed him dutifully around the property before he slipped inside via the sliding doors on the deck. Ben and Bev had arrived two days earlier, so their stuff was scattered all over the living room. There was a game of Cranium laid out next to a tipped-over bottle of whipped cream, which was a tableau Richie didn’t really care to have explained to him. He could hear Eddie and his lack of volume modulation explaining something about the washer-dryer to Patty and Stan upstairs. That just left Bill, who’d gotten in a spectacular fight with Audra and was now arriving a day later than expected, probably single or at least halfway to it.

A door past the kitchen opened and Bev waltzed out, wearing a long t-shirt with Ben’s face, a lit joint, and “The Burning Heart Tour” printed on it. Richie was not totally sure if she had pants on underneath. 

“Long time, no see,” she grinned, the California sunburn Richie had last seen her with still ruddy on her cheeks.

“Beverly!” he cried out in response, opening his arms to her.

Fondness that day was hitting Richie like a blizzard, buttressing him from all sides.

No one had ever told him, as a kid, how much friendship could sieve out of you. That _that_ was adulthood — seeing someone you swore you would donate a kidney to only once a year. It wasn’t until the muddy waters of his thirties that he’d discovered how tenuous all his relationships really were, spread out across cities and held together by happenstance. Any fleeting kinship he might have thought he’d felt snapping quick with the faintest hint of love or hate or success.

Richie had learned a lot, the past few years, about maintenance. What it took to keep someone in your life, what it meant to follow the radial directions in which they might warp and change. Patty said there were three parts to a relationship: two people and the relationship itself. You had to pay attention to that last one. You couldn’t just take it for granted. You had to put in the work, tending to it. Cheesy, grand gesture stuff, like renting a vacation house together or moving to the same city. Mundane stuff too, like phone calls and emails and genuine interest and commitment.

Bev steered him by the shoulders and led him to his bedroom. Eddie’s suitcases were already there, lined up in the back when Richie opened the closet. He stood in the entryway for a bit after he set his duffel bag down on the floor, just looking at the image of his and Eddie’s luggage filling empty space and time next to each other. Richie understood symbolism, so he knew that they were that third part: the relationship.

From behind him, Bev cleared her throat.

“The walls are thin,” she said, “So keep a lid on it when you fuck.”

Ben would have just left it at the first sentence, but Bev still liked to think she was transgressive, and more importantly, she liked to see Richie squirm.

He was good at displacement though. “Oh, you tested it?” he asked, volleying back with a simper.

“Yeah, we did,” Bev responded, leering even harder.

Eddie had wandered into the hallway. He slid, eel-like, between them. 

He gave Bev a strange look and said to her, slowly, “So. I haven’t seen Richie in a month.”

The two of them stared at each other for a solid minute, locked in some sort of complicated, eyebrow-based swordfight.

Finally, Bev threw up her hands.

“You’re paying,” she said, sticking a finger onto Eddie’s forehead.

Eddie smirked. He turned to Richie and said, “Do you have cash? Or can you give her your Discover card? You get 5% on restaurants with that one, right?”

“What? Why me? She said you were paying.”

Eddie rolled his eyes. “Yeah, which of us just signed a studio deal, fuckwad?”

Richie grumbled, but he pulled out his wallet. He passed his card to Bev. She twirled on one heel and singsonged, “Thanks!” She was still waving it in the air when she called out, “Boys, roll out! Drinks are on Richie!” down the landing.

Richie made to follow her to the stairs but Eddie stopped him in the doorway with a hand to his chest. “Not us,” he said lowly. He yelled, “She’s bringing us back enchiladas!” over his shoulder. 

“Yep, the kind that’ll give you the shits,” Bev yelled back.

“What’s happening?” Richie asked, matching Eddie’s low pitch.

Eddie smiled, laughing at him a little. An egg cracking across the diameter, the sharp whites of his teeth peeking out. His nasolabial folds deepened alongside the diamond-pointed end of his nose. There it was for the first time that day — the eternal pleasure of making Eddie laugh. Richie was going to chase it for the rest of his life.

“I haven’t seen you in a month,” Eddie repeated, and then he raised up on his toes to trace his tongue over Richie’s lips. Richie opened them. The yolk slipped, oily and bright, into his mouth.

* * *

On the occasion of Richie’s big public coming-out, he and Ben had smoked two bowls of Alien Cookies right before Richie had cried into a Blue Yeti microphone in Ben’s soundproofed garage. And now there were kids, and not just kids, but also full-grown adults, having deep, encyclopedic, full-bodied awakenings to their own selfhoods, all off the singular 21st-century strength of a Very Special podcast episode, the way Richie himself had had his entire universe propped upright when he’d first listened to Cher in 1987.

Richie was famous enough for one news cycle and two thinkpiece ones (he thought he could probably pull off a third if Steve would just let him do his own social media instead of paying that consulting firm to post for him) after the episode came out. He read enough headlines that month that the prefix seemed to come pre-attached to the rest of his name. _Oh, you can just call me Richie. Openly Gay was my father._

It was much more than he’d expected, for what was really just the byproduct of a newly acquired vocal tic. One Richie had worked hard at attaining, to be sure, but still one he had only sporadic control over.

A year of saying it to himself in the shower, his breath condensing in skeleton-laden droplets on the blotchy surface of the bathroom mirror.

A year of saying it to the people he said were his friends. 

A year of saying it to red carpet reporters fresh out of USC Annenberg, Everclear-wet behind the ears.

Sometimes he found himself buying four-ply toilet paper at CVS with the words ricocheting around the Pac-Man alleyways in his head: _I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay_. Then they rolled down, skee ball-style, out of the yawning cavern of his mouth. He picked them back up and underhanded them right into the center of some unsuspecting target — _Do you need a bag for that, sir?_ **_No thank you, I’m gay_ **— and all the tickets came clattering out.

When people went up to the counter to cash them in, he was relinquishing some of the power he’d long held, and wielded.

For years, his function in the world had been to puff hot air into the winds of social commentary, using the crude cannon fodder of Lindsay Lohan’s weight or Elton John’s haircut for a cheap laugh in the caustic ways he’d always been rewarded for. It was his comeuppance, now, to be caught in the blowback; only fair for him to be grinning and bearing it.

It had been easier to be a villain, or at the very least, a henchman. Doing the dirty work for the proverbial douchebag. Now that he wanted to scrub away the mocking affect he had coated his voice in for years, he was discovering that it was as good as baked in, the bottom crust of an overused cast-iron skillet, starting to rust at the sides. He was up to his forearms in elbow grease, repenting. He was afraid he’d peel everything off just to find that there was nothing underneath of any value.

Richie had been a workaholic for years, because saying yes was faster than coming up with reasons to say no. But the gross-out sex fiend stuff didn’t work so well for gay guys, because, Eddie said, “we live in a homophobic deep-state.” Part of that was alright with Richie, who had always been much shyer about sex than he’d admitted or led on.

He had tried doing the confessional anti-comedy that was all the rage, or from the looks of it, soon would be. It hadn’t quite taken yet. Richie was still not so practiced at open-mouthed unselfconsciousness. He had spent most of his life avoiding one stage for the other. Flaying open his front to divert attention from the rawhide skin of his back. Now, they wanted him to offer the rest of himself up, all 360 degrees. Vivisected. Stripped for parts. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever be ready to bleed out completely. 

As compromise, as cop-out, he’d been taking film roles, voiceover spots. He hadn’t been on a stage in his own skin for more than a year now. He’d show up at some friend of a friend’s improv show as shrink-rayed Piers Morgan or mafioso Guy Fieri at the drop of a porkpie hat, but gay Richie Tozier appearances were few and far between. It was probably a lot easier because it was less real. The part he’d been playing for decades had been written summarily off the show. You couldn’t blame him for falling back on his old habits, for aping someone else’s routine. Just to keep having something to say.

“Get your own shtick, dickwipe!” someone, probably Stan, yelled from the rafters of self-reflection. Richie was inclined to agree. It was harder than it seemed, making yourself into something deserving of the limelight. 

But here was another thing about impressions that came to mind: If you wanted to be a great, not just good, impressionist, you needed empathy. You had to pay attention to people, their mannerisms and affectations, and you had to be invested in the essence of who they were. It was what got the audience on board, the promise that how you saw the world was worth trusting. And that took practice. That took time. That took sitting down and letting the world turn its way around you, slower than the MTV-interstitial pace of straight Richie’s mouth.

Richie had always been good. Now he wanted to be great. Or maybe it was the other way around. He was going to do his due diligence, either way.

* * *

The main attraction in Page, Arizona was Antelope Canyon. This was a natural landmark made famous in part due to having been featured as a Windows 7 preset screensaver. Its name was _Tsé bighánílíní_ in the Diné language, the tour guide said. Richie flicked the syllables delicately off his tongue.

The digital version didn’t do it justice. They followed the tour group and stood under organic skylights, sunlight cascading into the canyon’s amphitheater depths. Even Eddie, who was probably the least likely to be swayed by natural wonder, gasped out loud at the sunset gradients and the vast curving forms of the sedimentary walls. 

Richie said the words “vaginal canal” too loud into Bill’s ear. Bill giggled but he also pointed to some kids ahead of them and shushed Richie loud enough to draw even more attention their way.

Patty and Stan and Ben and Bev were walking ahead in perfect pairs, hands in hands. They talked animatedly with each of their other halves. It was easy for them. Richie couldn’t say the same. He stuck studiously by Bill’s side and tried not to suggest that he had anything extraordinary to do with Eddie.

They took a water break outside the cave. The eight of them circled up around a huge agave, surreptitiously passing around Ben’s stash of Very Special caramels. Richie chewed, biting down on the agrarian aftertaste as he watched Eddie wander off to the side, head pressed in deep conversation next to Mike’s.

Richie pointed to a lizard sunning itself in between a pair of rocks. “Eddie, look,” he said, his favorite fucking refrain for nearly a dozen years now. The amount of time it took to get through grade school, and no, that wasn’t lost on Richie. An education in wanting someone’s attention so bad you couldn’t stand it, you’d pratfall and spit-take just to get them to notice you, present and bursting with desire.

“It looks like your dick and balls.”

“Shut the fuck up, Richie. My dick is bigger than that.”

“He fucks you with that tiny dick?” asked Bill, frowning and looking back and forth between the lizard and Eddie’s crotch.

“My dick is bigger than the lizard!” Eddie repeated. Everyone pretended to ignore him.

“Damn, Richie, do you even feel it?” Patty asked, shaking her head.

“It’s not the size that matters. It’s the little tongue that flicks out,” Richie said. He stuck out his own tongue and wiggled it at Patty, who laughed.

“I’ll kill you,” said Eddie. He had walked over to stand by them again and now he punched Richie gently in the bicep with the ridged range of his knuckles. Richie flinched, much more than he should have. Eddie noticed. He drew back instead of lingering. Richie could see him shrink into himself a little, before he puffed back up and turned to face Patty and Stan.

“You two want in on this?” Eddie asked, “I heard married couples can’t testify against each other.” He had his face turned away and his spine locked upright, stiff in the way Richie recognized but still couldn’t quite pin down enough to name. It was somewhere between disappointment and embarrassment. He imagined the vertebrae clicking into place like a chattering line of teeth _tsk_ ing him to task. He felt guilt flush heavy through the hairpin turns of his capillaries.

Eddie stopped him later underneath a big rock overhang, because he was the one who pushed first, who wouldn’t run away. He was pointedly not touching him, but he boxed Richie in as if to remind him that he could — maybe, that he should.

“Richie, we’re going to live together,” he said. He scuffed his shoe across the dirt like an impatient horse. “You have to give me something to work with.”

“I’m trying,” Richie pleaded, the most he could promise and the least he could manage.

“Try harder,” Eddie replied. He pursed his lips, which was the way his face contorted when he was biting down on hurt, and he started to walk away.

Well, that was hypocritical.

“You too!” Richie yelled after him.

“I will, asshole!” Eddie yelled back.

* * *

It had happened for the first time three months ago, after the first time Richie had fucked him, because Eddie was dramatic, and prone to accidental poetics like that. Richie was the one who said it with his human man voice, during, because it felt good to, because Eddie would let him. After, they rolled over and Richie dropped the condom into the little Ikea trash can by his bed. He’d had to massage his hamstring because he’d been kneeling behind Eddie for the last part, and the mattress had the kind of sag Eddie was always complaining about, which Richie was starting to agree with, if the way that the valleying give of it had recently knee-capped him had anything to say about it.

Richie was still coasting on the euphoric wave of Eddie’s commanding cries of _harder_ , _faster_ , _I know you can fuck me better than that, big boy_. It was good, and flattering, and the physics of it were arguably easier, because Richie could pin Eddie down and jostle him around with a lot less diagrammatic planning than it took when they did it the other way around. But they only saved it for special occasions, for when Richie had the foresight to store up on possession or when Eddie was wearing a particularly tight pair of pants. Most days, he much preferred to lie back and think of Eddie, looming over him, all wound-up power and spooled grace.

He flopped an arm over the taut breadth of Eddie’s stomach and tucked his head under his armpit, tonguing letters into the skin between his right nipple and his ribcage. None of it, verbal or haptic, was anything new. Richie had let it rip without qualifications weeks earlier, nowhere special, just some froyo spot in Silver Lake; because the afternoon sun had gilded Eddie’s loosened hair with gold, and Eddie had yelled at a passing goose for blocking the foot traffic on the sidewalk, and he’d put chocolate sauce over pineapple chunks just because Richie had bet that he wouldn’t, and his nose was wrinkling at the taste but he was making obnoxious smacking sounds around the pink plastic spoon anyway — and Richie had experienced it (the fairytale, the whole shebang) so suddenly and strongly that he thought it might bowl him over, the exact sort of high-impact gale that Chicagoland newscasts had taken considerable lengths to prepare him for in his childhood. It knocked him, metaphorically, onto the ground nonetheless.

Because Eddie was no one but himself, all of the time. Because Richie knew that every word he had ever learned since his big, floppy mouth had first formed in the amniotic sac was simply the prerequisite to this.

So he’d said it, just that once out loud with his mind screwed on, and then three or four more times in the middle of an orgasm (which, really, he couldn’t be blamed for. Eddie had always been a prodigy when it came to laying pipe), but it wasn’t like he’d expected to hear it back. Eddie had hangups. Eddie felt the same way. Richie knew both of these things, and he knew it was a gift, to know those things. He held all of it precisely in the space between the back of his neck and his pillow every night after they hung up the phone. He didn’t need the salutation on the postcard. He was still getting it in the mail. It was easier to say I love you than to mean it.

Later, as Richie was falling asleep, Eddie swirling his fingertips in slow circles on the back of his skull, he thought he heard him murmur something that sounded like “Me too.”

In the morning, he hovered anxiously by the kitchen doorway as Richie made coffee. Richie knew something was wrong because even a jet-lagged Eddie usually had to be dragged out of bed by the ankles before 9am.

He watched as Richie drank in one long, steady gulp. Richie put the mug down on the counter behind him and braced his arms backwards on the edge, watching back.

“Hi,” Eddie said. He rubbed his eyes and walked toward Richie at the counter, his bare feet gliding across the tiled floor. His hair was sticking up at the back and he was wearing one of Richie’s old t-shirts. The sleep-rumpled scowl Richie was lucky enough to bear witness to. Eddie Kaspbrak’s one-man vendetta against the daybreak dependency of the rising sun.

Eddie landed in front of him, his bare feet kissing Richie’s socked ones, toe-to-toe.

He snuck a hand under Richie’s shirt. With the delicate press of one index finger, he traced the same set of letters that Richie had used his tongue to outline the night before. “I” and “L” and all the rest. 

At the top of the “U,” Eddie’s finger stilled. He flattened his whole hand against Richie’s torso, under the bottom ledge of his lungs. Richie sucked in a breath.

“Hey,” Eddie said. He was studying the hem of Richie’s t-shirt. The pulse of Richie’s heartbeat striking against his calloused palm. “I mean it. I’m going to say it. I promise.”

“I don’t - You don’t need to,” Richie said, soft and stilled.

Eddie looked up, his big eyes shredding Richie’s brain waves into ragged, curling ribbons.

“I want to,” Eddie said.

Richie was an optimist. Richie was patient. Of course Richie believed him.

He’d always thought he was particularly tractable when it came to Eddie Kaspbrak. But that was all about perspective. It turned out that he gave and he took and he resisted like a solid wall of ice, just as much as Eddie did. Two glacial forms floating stolid until they crashed.

Here’s what he could do, though: He could expose himself to the heat and allow himself to melt. He could curve his neck down and meet Eddie halfway.

* * *

**Ben:** So what was it that clinched it for you? Was that the point that was like, okay, I need to do this, I’m going to do this?

 **Richie:** It wasn’t just one thing. It had escalated, you know? Like, imagine your car windshield gets a hairline crack. And you think, shit, I gotta fix that, but you don’t, because, well, it’s such a hassle to get to the auto shop, you’ll probably get scammed, you can barely even see the crack, anyway.

 **Ben:** But that’s poor auto care.

 **Richie:** Oh, for sure. Exactamundo, man. Because the crack starts spreading. _[pause]_ Just like your mom’s.

 **Ben:** Not for you though.

 **Richie:** Oh no, she’s a lovely woman, tell her thank you again for the wonderful blackberry jam she mailed me. She should actually sell that stuff, she’d make a killing.

 **Ben:** I’m actually helping her set up an Etsy shop.

 **Richie:** Oh, good for her. She need me to do an ad for that? I will.

 **Ben:** Yeah, this episode is sponsored by Arlene Hanscom’s homemade jam.

 **Richie:** You hear that, Smuckers? Watch your fucking backs.

 **Ben:** You’re on Smuck cam.

_[laughing]_

**Richie:** Seriously, guys, that jam is so good. You put it on toast, it sets the scene for the rest of your day. _[pause]_ It’s like pre-come for breakfast.

 **Ben:** Beep beep, Trashmouth.

 **Richie:** Alright, alright. What was I talking about? Cracks? You know -

 **Ben:** _[laughing]_ Richie, stay on topic.

 **Richie:** Fine! So the crack, the _windshield_ crack, spreads, because that’s what time and pressure do to it, right? Now it’s taken over the whole driver’s seat side and it’s basically ready to implode, but you’re already going 80 down 405, and it’s way too late to get it replaced. So what do you do? You either brace yourself, pray to God and Jesus and Buddha that it just doesn’t break, or –

 **Ben:** Or you get out of the car.

 **Richie:** Exactly! You get out of the car. And maybe, you just go break it yourself.

 **Ben:** Ouch. Wouldn’t that hurt? Now you got glass flying everywhere.

 **Richie:** Sure, but you can control how it breaks, right? Hurts less when you can see it coming, when you can tell it where to go.

 **Ben:** So in this metaphor, which I have to say, is hanging on by a thread at this point –

 **Richie:** The windshield is the closet.

 **Ben:** Okay. The car’s what, your life? Your career?

 **Richie:** Hm, either. Or. Whichever the fans care about more.

 **Ben:** Sure, so in this metaphor, are you getting back into the car? Bear in mind you don’t have a windshield, so that means anything could hurtle into it and just one-hit K.O. you. 

**Richie:** Yeah, I guess so. I really needed to get to Long Beach.

* * *

It was just four of them on the trail on the third day, Richie, Mike, Ben, and Bev. Patty and Stan were taking a pottery class, and Bill had twisted his ankle the day before. Eddie was staying behind at the rental, enforcing strict bed rest. 

“You’re really gonna marry that guy?” Richie said to Bev, jerking a thumb in the direction of where Ben was coaxing a toad off the center of the path.

“I don’t know,” Bev said, but she was looking somewhere in the vicinity of Ben’s thighs with the sort of tender glint that answered the question for her. “Me and marriages don’t seem to mix. Maybe we’ll do a civil union.”

Richie hitched backwards, mock-appalled. “That’s appropriation,” he said in the foppish timbre that he and Eddie argued over sometimes because Eddie said he wasn’t gay enough to get away with it. Richie would snipe back, “Well, what’s gay _enough_?” and Eddie would get flustered and try to backtrack.

“Nut up and bring your man to the ceremony, and then you can talk,” Bev said.

“I was gonna bring Stan’s mom, actually.”

“If you bring another person as a bit, Richie, I will debone you and serve you as the chicken dish,” she warned.

Richie groaned. “You just don’t understand my _process_ ,” he whined. He threw the imaginary end of an imaginary scarf over his right shoulder.

Bev kicked a dusty patch of dirt into the back of his ankle. Richie felt the grains settle like snow into his shoe, down the slope of his heel.

At some point, they split in half, Martin-and-Lewis-esque. Ben wanted to take some photos by an apparently well-known butte, which Richie would have, and had, sprung for, two days earlier. But the novelty had worn off and he was tired of walking an extra two miles just to see another big rock that only looked like its anatomical quasi-namesake if you squinted and really thought about it.

“So,” said Mike, standing in tree pose, the New Age asshole. They were at the terminal of the trail proper, under a big rock arch Mike said dated back to the Jurassic period. Mike also said it was a channel for sacred healing energy, which was when Richie had started tuning him out. “How’s Eddie?”

“You’ve seen him,” Richie said. He bent halfway at the waist, breathing heavy. 

“It’s a relational question,” said Mike. He dropped his arms and stood like a normal person again. He bent down too, but just to reach into his backpack and toss Richie a water bottle. Richie didn’t catch it. He had to scrabble even closer to the ground to pick it up, and then his palm was covered in the muddy red mix of condensation and dirt. When he stood back up, he glared at Mike, who just shrugged and went into Warrior II. Richie knew what it was called because he lived intermittently with Eddie, who had a Socratic method kink and made Richie learn the names of his yoga poses before he would consent to post-workout sex.

Richie figured he probably shouldn’t be having sex flashbacks while looking at his platonic friend Mike Hanlon, though. He tipped his head back and took a big drink of the water.

“Well, you saw us together too,” he said, when set his head back down. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so he could feel the water spread wide across his foldout couch chest, course down his small intestine, and settle cold in the pit of his stomach.

Mike hummed. He was leaning with his back on a big rock, arms and ankles crossed. Maybe it was a boulder. Richie had not been paying enough attention to the tour guide the first day to know the difference, or whether or not it mattered.

“I feel a little better about not noticing it, before,” Mike said. You could probably read it as either patient or patronizing. Richie picked patronizing.

“What’s that mean?” he complained, bristling.

“It means you can hold your boyfriend’s hand once in a while,” Mike said, “It’s not going to fall off.”

Richie sat down on a rock. He tried to look up at Mike and got a glaring eyeful of blinding sunlight. He had to put a hand up to his forehead and angle it down over his glasses to shield his eyes. He let out a sigh. 

“I’m a piece of shit, huh,” he said. 

“Richie, I didn’t mean-”

“You know that Minions movie I was in?”

“You were in that?”

“Fuck you, man, that was a global blockbuster. I know I emailed you about it.”

“Yeah,” Mike interrupted, laughing. “I watched it on a train to Bucharest. Who were you again? Tourist #1? Stellar line reading. You got an award for that yet?”

“It won a Kids Choice, so yeah, technically.”

Mike golf-clapped. Richie threw a handful of pebbles at him.

“You remember the plot at all? The villain guy, Steve Carrell?”

“Yeah, Gru.”

“Right. So the movie’s about being a good role model or whatever, right? The kids and the redemption arc.”

Mike moved his hand in a circular “go on” motion.

“I just think, you know, there’s no way it cancels out that easy. He spent his whole life stealing shit, fucking people over. He does one grand gesture at the end, and what? The slate is wiped clean?”

“It’s a pretty big gesture,” said Mike, “He puts the moon back into the sky.”

“Yeah, the moon that he stole! It wouldn’t even be a problem if he wasn’t evil in the first place. It’s too pat, is what I’m saying. When you’ve hurt a lot of people, people you don’t even know, you can’t just put it all back. It doesn’t work like that in real life.”

“You can’t steal the moon in real life.”

“It’s about teaching good lessons,” said Richie, ignoring him, “Kids are watching. They soak up a lot in their squished-up little sponge brains.”

Mike put his hands on his hips. “The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain,” he intoned. 

“I’m sorry, what? Is that scripture? You fuckass nerd, are you doing, like, sermon on the mount?”

Mike laughed. He spread his arms out. Titanic. Or Christ the Redeemer.

“You know I’m Jewish. Like, on my nephew’s side,” Richie said, giggling along with him. It felt good to laugh there, with the cool air bracketing his face, imagining the sound waves bouncing off the walls of the red-rimmed ridge around them.

“That was Baldwin. Giovanni’s Room,” Mike said, smiling, “I’ll lend it to you. You’d appreciate it, I think.”

* * *

They went to a shitty buffet for dinner, because Mike said he missed processed foods and wanted the opportunity to make an especially deranged salad. 

“You fucking snob,” said Eddie, “As if you weren’t snorting McDonald’s breakfasts in France.”

They were all squeezed around one too-small table in the back half of the restaurant, like a bunch of theater kids terrorizing a diner on prom night.

At some point during his second dessert plate, Eddie brought his arm up and across the back of the booth, curving around to the other side of Richie’s shoulder.

Richie held himself stock-still. It was clearly a test, and one that he was on track to fail. 

Eddie was still talking avidly to the rest of the table as if nothing had changed. As if the extent of Richie’s focus had not been whittled down to the long, singular line of his proprietorial arm. 

Richie was good at touching whenever he thought he could get away with it.

In New York, he put his hands around Eddie’s waist in the shadowy corners of the bodega by Eddie’s place, overseen by dusty bags of cat food and gardening soil.

On the road, he stroked Eddie’s ankles under the table with the snout of his beat-up tennis shoes, whenever they met up on layovers in dinky hotel bars.

In Los Angeles, after they left the Utah-Arizona borderlands, he was going to have Eddie at hand whenever he wanted. He was going to kiss him awake and to bed every day of the week, forward- and reverse-Sleeping Beauty-style. Maybe he’d rub sunscreen on his back out in the open on the Ventura Pier. They were going to share a lease, a grocery list, and a laundry schedule. That was domesticity, or so he’d heard, to braid the minutiae of your lives by the sprout and the bud and the root. 

In a Golden Corral knockoff outside Lake Powell, Richie stood at the threshold and stared up into the heavens-bound abyss. At the very least, he thought, he ought to be able to tangle their hands together when the sun was crossing the meridian. That which was concealed and that which was fed by the light.

There were a lot of things he was afraid of. For instance, pain, ridicule, disdain. Et cetera. It was astoundingly easy to come up with reasons. They arrived in trayfuls each day, the endless fax-machine crawl of both excuse and justified fear. Each time he stepped into the spotlight, stage or sidewalk, required reams of cross-reference before he’d allow himself the suggestion of something like a drooping wrist. Or better, or worse, a boyfriend. His tracksuited neighbor with the Evangelical mom haircut, the foreman at the construction site by his publicist’s office, the family of four in matching Zion National Park baseball caps on a canyon tour — every new audience member held in their hands the twinned power to banish or to anoint.

It was quite a lot like stand-up comedy, in that way. Pausing and leaning forward on the balls of your feet, awaiting the tensile relief of reaction. Either you bombed or you killed; either way it was violent; either way someone got hurt.

Well, you could do just okay, too, but no one ever cared about that.

He looked around the table. There was Bev with an arm around Ben’s waist. There was Patty wiping sauce off of Stan’s chin. There was Stan laughing and burying his face into Ben’s shoulder. There was Bill listing into Mike’s side. Touching could mean a lot of things, but mostly it meant, _I am here and you are here and here we are together_.

Richie let his back muscles relax in increments. Eddie’s thumb coasted along the crest of his shoulder. Richie’s pulse followed it.

Here he was, leaping head-first into the deep end, holding his breath, the chlorinated water shooting up in a reverse-luge straight into his nasal cavity. Richie had never gotten a handle on how to dive. He always chickened out and drew his head up right before the rest of his pitching body made impact.

The thumb repeated its gentle strokes. Richie felt his death grip on the edge of his seat loosen.

This time, he closed his eyes and leaned back, into the generous person-shaped space underneath Eddie’s right arm. This time, he pressed his knee to the left in gratitude as the arm rounded and stretched.

* * *

The very first time they’d had sex, Eddie had branded it stress relief. Richie had thought the label was for Eddie’s benefit the first time around, realized years later that it had been for his own, and then horse-shoed halfway back around when he finally understood it had been for them both.

Eddie had crowded in close to him, sidling up and lingering for longer than Richie had ever dared. “You know what I do when I get stage fright?” he’d said, the sentence landing too clunkily out of his mouth to have not been premeditated. Richie had only realized this later, though. He was impractically farsighted on both the physical and mental levels, so at the time he’d just assumed he’d been quantum leaped into a fantasy porn universe.

He’d been embarrassingly revealing with how desperate he’d been, twisting and whimpering in Eddie’s firm grasp. It had probably set the tone for everything that had come after, after he came. Richie angling his head to plead for a kiss, Richie leaving two things: the club early and Eddie in the lurch, Richie groveling the next day under five different layers of ironic self-deprecation, the only way he knew how.

“Sorry I skipped out before I had a chance to say sayonara,” he’d said, “Crazy thing. I got my dick yanked clean off my body. Someone really sprung the joint. Huge accomplishment, if you know what I mean. Anyways, I’ve been looking for it all day. You think I can put this Lost Dick No Reward flyer up in your building? Totally understand if not, it’s not really my thing either, stealing dicks like that.”

Eddie had been silent for a long moment — Richie remembered this clearly, how it made his spine itch down to his toes. Finally he said, “Yeah, I have seen it. It’s in my room, actually. You want to come in, let me put it back on for you?”

A lot of things had changed, since then. The first time, the second time, Richie had high-tailed it out of there without so much as a by-your-leave. It took maybe five or six before he’d allow himself to linger, order bad takeout and queue up a game of Need for Speed, the way they usually had before uncovered dicks entered the equation. For a while, neither of them would reference it at all after they got off, just zipped back up and moved to opposite couch cushions. Eddie would make him wash his hands before Richie touched the controller, and that was the extent of any post-coital care.

But a lot of things had changed. They cuddled now, for one. It was bewildering, a lot of the time. Richie wasn’t sure if he was supposed to enjoy it. Sometimes, he would wake suddenly, at the climax of a fuzzy-fringed dream, blearily registering the contours of his own body as his brain filled in the outline of his form. Then it would begin to tally a cheek pressed to his collarbone, a forearm sticking to his waist, a knee knocking against his thigh. His mind would detach, like he was watching himself from above. There he was, in all his clunky, inelegant glory, swaddled in between the comforter and Eddie’s front affixed steadily to his.

Eddie ran hot, which sounded like a fun and sexy come-on, and Richie had certainly used it as such, but practically speaking, it was just a frustrating fact of life. Eddie was constantly flinging the covers off of himself in his sleep so that they were either a) piled heavily atop Richie’s spine, or b) waterfalling all the way off the side of the bed. Both cases led to Eddie squeezing closer, like he wanted to be covered in Richie instead of machine-washable linen. This was another thing that sounded fun and sexy, yet had more complex implications than what Richie was always comfortable with.

He thought it must seem peaceful: Eddie’s head pillowed against Richie’s chest, the rise and fall of his shoulders affixing a bassline to his raspy snore. He probably didn’t deserve that, the peacefulness. There were people out there still quoting Trashmouth jokes, Toze one-liners, all the cruel shrapnel he’d shot out into the world. Nothing he could say, apology or otherwise, was going to stop it from whizzing by and clipping someone new.

Richie felt whatever the opposite of peaceful was. Turbulent.

“You should touch me,” Eddie had said, “When that happens. Even when I’m asleep. If it makes you feel better.” 

So Richie tapped two fingers along the cut of Eddie’s chin. Exposure therapy. The solid bone under his skin was real and it was Richie’s to touch. He touched it and he thought to himself, _I love his jaw_.

He curved an arm around the furrow underneath Eddie’s ribs, pulling them closer together. He let the rhythm of his shallow inhales anchor him back onto the mattress. He thought to himself, _I love his lungs._

He ran his hand down the curve of Eddie’s ass and let it rest in the crease of his thigh. Richie thought to himself, _I love him, I love him, I love him_ , over and over, until it lulled him back to sleep.

* * *

**Richie:** I guess, a good friend of mine — of both of us, actually.

 **Ben:** Ah, yeah, love that little goober.

 **Richie:** Yeah, our friend came out, and it was, I dunno, a kick in the pants, kick in the teeth -

 **Ben:** Kick in the nuts.

 **Richie:** Only if I ask nicely!

_[laughing]_

**Richie:** So yeah, he told me it fucking sucked for a fuckton of reasons. 

**Ben:** Oh, it sucked, did it?

 **Richie:** Ben! You’re on a roll today. Texas Roadhouse up in this bitch.

 **Ben:** Learned from the best.

 **Richie:** God, Bennifer, have I told you I loved you yet today?

 **Ben:** Not enough!

 **Richie:** I do! I do.

 **Ben:** Aw, I love you too.

 **Richie:** Ben, I’m so, so flattered, but I gotta break it to you, I’m already taken. _[pause]_ Shit, I didn’t mean to reveal that right now.

 **Ben:** We can take it out or get back to it later, your call.

 **Richie:** Ok, uh, let’s revisit. _[pause]_ Anyways, what was I saying?

 **Ben:** Our, um, our friend that came out.

 **Richie:** Oh yep, that guy. Very cool guy, cool friend. Yeah, he came out. Which was, like, it was crazy! I mean, _none_ of us knew.

 **Ben:** Uh-huh.

 **Richie:** Model closet case. And I’m one to talk.

 **Ben:** Yeah, yeah. So you had a heart-to-heart?

 **Richie:** We talked a few times. I’m not really a fast learner. But he told me something that kind of stuck with me, you know? There’s this thing you hear when people come out, that they’re living their truth. Which is, well...I always figured, that’s empty bullshit. It’s just a platitude, it doesn’t really mean anything. There’s no such thing as objective truth, let alone one you own completely.

 **Ben:** Everything’s a performance, huh?

 **Richie:** Exactly! Spoken like a true entertainer. A fuckton of people go their whole lives having gay sex and they don’t think they’re gay. Who’s to say that’s not their truth? It’s true for them. I wasn’t gay as long as I never told myself I was. 

**Ben:** Can’t that hurt people? Their partners, the people that look up to them.

 **Richie:** I said it was _a_ truth, not necessarily an ethical one. Although, sometimes it is. A lot of people can’t come out. It’s risky, or it’s life-threatening. Sometimes the easy way out keeps you alive.

 **Ben:** Were you in that situation?

 **Richie:** Maybe at the beginning. But not for a while. Not for at least a decade. Materially speaking, I’d known I could do it. I had money, safety, support. I had gay friends who were doing great.

 **Ben:** Were you scared?

 **Richie:** Terrified. I’m a huge pussy. I can say that now, by the way.

 **Ben:** Why, ‘cause you don’t actually eat it?

 **Richie:** Ben! You taste your mother’s jam with that mouth? _[laughs]_ No, I meant I can say it because I mean it in the positive sense.

 **Ben:** Oh, uh-huh. And what’s that?

 **Richie:** That I’m beautiful and sensitive.

 **Ben:** I can corroborate that.

 **Richie:** Ugh, Ben 10, I only have so much self-control.

 **Ben:** Apologies, I’ll rein it in.

 **Richie:** I was complaining to eh - our friend, about the truth thing. I thought, I don’t know, I thought he’d think it was stupid. Call me an assmunch for making excuses.

 **Ben:** Does that happen a lot?

 **Richie:** No, he was actually very patient. Most people have been. I guess I just don’t expect them to be. Case in point, he agreed with me. But he also said something I hadn’t thought of before. He said, “You know, Richie, truth can be relative. It’s not just absolute. Don’t just ask yourself, _Am I gay?_ Ask yourself, _Do I want to be?_ ” That cracked it all open for me. I’d say “no,” instinctively, and then immediately after, I’d think “but why not?” It made me question, _is this a world I want to be gay in?_ And when it wasn’t, I thought, _what can I do to make it one?_

Right after they wrapped, Richie bit his lip and asked Ben, “Do you think people will know it’s him?”

“Eh, someone on Reddit will probably guess it. But don’t stress about it. I don’t think it’s obvious. Nothing you said would confirm it,” Ben answered, twining the cord of his headphones into a neat, layered sphere. He stood up and stretched his arms to the ceiling, the big lug, butterflying his biceps out from behind his head. “And, no offense, but I bet no one really cares.”

Richie snorted. That was probably true. He was C-list on a good day. Eddie was D+ and that was only if he shaved.

“Have you guys, you know, talked about it? Going public?”

“Not in so many words,” Richie said. He spun around in his chair and stood up too.

Ben was holding out the bong. Richie took a grateful hit, exhaling right back into his face, Ben opened his mouth and pretended to inhale it back in.

“I know I said all that crap just now about coming out, but you _know_ that’s different. This is private. It’s not just about me, and it’s really, _really_ none of their business,” Richie said, “I got people up my ass trying to get me to slip up all the time. They don’t fucking deserve to know shit.”

Ben hummed. “No, I get that,” he said. “I don’t mean you have to announce it.”

“I know you want another confession episode. You like exploiting my trauma for that sweet, sweet Dollar Shave Club money.”

“Look, the first time Bev and I got papped, after Tom? That was really effing scary. And I’m not saying it’s the same thing, but to some degree, I get it, alright? I get that it’s invasive. I get that it’s dangerous. I get that fear of who’s going to see it and what they’re going to think or do. We can’t change the whole - what does Stan call it again? Celebrity complex, something like that?”

“Celebrity-industrial complex.”

“That’s it. We’re not going to change the whole celebrity-industrial complex. Occupational hazard. But you knew that. It’s in the contract.” Ben put the bong down and looked at Richie with teary-eyed intent.

“The thing is, Richie? All that work into hiding what makes me happy? It makes it hard to really live.”

* * *

So a lot of things had changed between the two of them: Richie and Eddie. Or vice versa, because Eddie insisted it should go in alphabetical order. 

Here was another one of the things: Richie was in love with him. That was clear and surprisingly easy to admit. Richie wasn’t very well-versed in love, but he understood that it was the simple name for the gnawing urge to shrink-ray yourself, crawl inside, and try to understand someone on a molecular level. To see the whole production, start to finish. He wanted the pitch and the treatment, the director’s cut, all the DVD extras.

What had taken longer to admit was that Richie loved him. The act of it was more of a choice than the state of it. He could chalk _being in love_ up to horny enchantment, even professional fascination. _Loving_ was something else entirely. 

Richie had fought against it. Underneath it all, from the start, had been the suggestion of terror from an inhospitable world. For a long time, they’d both wrangled down the resentment meant for the place at large and aimed it instead at each other. There was a lot of damage incurred, thanks to that. Richie had thought he shouldn’t be allowed to let the weaknesses of his flesh to govern the contracted menu of his actions. He couldn’t, and he didn’t; he put his head down to suck Eddie’s dick and he never once looked up, until the sky fell down and it was eye-level and he couldn’t any longer avoid it.

There it was. The objective, absolute truth. He loved Eddie, like he loved all the people who had wormed or shouldered their way into his life. He knew this because he went to Eddie’s shows and he laughed at Eddie’s jokes and he listened with rapt attention when he talked about contract negotiations or carburetors or good digestive health. He knew this because it gave him a 1-up mushroom power boost anytime he fell even sideways into the path of any of the people that he loved, and being around Eddie always gave him that, shell-shocked him with joy and disbelief.

And here was the relative truth: He loved Eddie best of all. He knew this because he wanted to kiss Eddie and hold his hand and know about his retirement plan and never, ever let him go. He knew this because Eddie made him want — Eddie himself, of course, but also a world that wanted him to want Eddie, and a world that led everyone else to their own Eddies. To people that could match you step by step, soul to soul. To people who would catch their hand in yours and never, ever let you go.

* * *

Sometime in the evening on their second-to-last day in Arizona, Eddie told Richie to meet him by the car at midnight. It was all very vague and budget Prince Charming, but thankfully, Richie was someone who could be constantly and easily charmed.

Besides that first afternoon when Bev had graciously emptied the house to facilitate some spirited reunion sex, they had only really been trading blowjobs in the shower. This was because, on the first night, the entire house had been woken up to what could be charitably termed moaning and less charitably called screaming, power-blasting out of the door to Stan and Patty’s room. The next morning, Ben had arranged a “house rules” meeting over eggs and sausage (Eddie stomping on Richie’s toes when he opened his mouth about it), as if they were signing riders on the set of _The Real World_. It had led to a sufficient amount of secondhand embarrassment, enough that both Richie and Eddie had silently agreed to keep it in their pants for the rest of their time in the house (heavy shower soundtrack notwithstanding).

Outside was not inside, though, so at exactly 12:01 AM, Eddie pushed him up against the car door and began to maul at Richie’s mouth. The door handle dug into Richie’s back as Eddie’s hands roamed greedily down his sides. It still sparked adrenaline through Richie’s veins, the feel of it, of Eddie and his heat-seeking mouth honing in and pinning him in place.

Eddie licked over the back of Richie’s teeth, flicked his tongue under the jut of his overbite. Richie grazed his incisors over the textured carpet of his tastebuds and pulled back, panting.

“Are we having sex out here?” he asked.

“No,” said Eddie, staring up at him, “Like five miles away.”

It took nearly ten minutes to get there because Eddie was trying too hard not to speed, gripping a tight 10-and-2 on the steering wheel as Richie rubbed his left hand over the spread-eagle span of his upper thigh. “I swear to God, Richie, if I hit a coyote, we are not going to fuck,” Eddie threatened more than once, but he made no attempt to shake him off.

Finally, they stopped at a lookout clearing by the side of the road. It had a six-space parking lot and two coin-operated binoculars set along the railing. Eddie put the car into park and got out.

“I gotta say,” Richie remarked, “This isn’t _not_ sketchy. Giving me ‘70s serial killer, Eds.”

Eddie had popped the trunk and was reaching inside for something, so his voice was muffled when he said, “Look up. The stars are really nice.”

Richie did. They were, and numerous. Much more than you could see from either light-pollutioned coast.

Eddie was calling to him again, this time beckoning to a slope off the side of the car. Richie crossed over, to where Eddie was standing with an armful of quilted blankets from the rental home’s linen closet and an electric lantern swinging from one hand. He laid the blankets out onto the dirt, one on top of the other, and set the lantern down in the right-hand corner. When he switched it on, the angles of his face and the spread of his limbs swallowed up the warm new cushion of light. He took his phone out and tapped at it until music started streaming out.

“Sade?” Richie asked, mouth quirked up.

“Ben made me a playlist,” said Eddie. He looked eager-to-please, which was an expression Richie usually only recognized in himself. Whenever it was directed back at him, it filled Richie up with cupfuls of oxygen, rushing straight to his head, bubbling out of his mouth.

He took a deep breath and said, “Where are the rose petals? The champagne?”

Eddie grinned. He stood up and loped back towards the car.

Richie wasn’t quite sure what he was meant to do next. All signs had been pointing to outdoor sex (Eddie had told him to clean up right? Richie was definitely going to be pissed if it turned out he’d douched for no reason) before Eddie had pulled out this whole Valentine’s romance kit. Maybe they were just going to neck a bit and share a plate of seedless grapes. Which actually sounded nice, now that he thought about it, his vision running a little gooey as he pictured Eddie in a laurel wreath, curved around him and petting down Richie’s flank.

Fantasies aside (file that to the roleplay idea box), the temperature had also dropped considerably. It wasn’t cold, but it would certainly be chilly were Richie to start taking his clothes off. He settled for sliding off his sandals and cupping his dick for a few seconds through his shorts, just in case.

Eddie came back. Enter, stage left. He’d pulled something out of the trunk and had in his arms another blanket, plus a tall paper bag. He draped the blanket over Richie’s shoulders, hands lingering as he smoothed it down. He pulled two bottles out of the bag: champagne, lube.

“I didn’t get roses, but there’s chocolate in here,” Eddie said, peering into the bag and then holding it out so Richie could look too. He frowned. “I’ll buy you roses tomorrow.”

“What’s the occasion?”

“Being here with you,” said Eddie, smooth as all hell. “I thought we deserved something nice. _You_ deserve something nice.”

“Oh,” said Richie.

“Oh,” echoed Eddie, smirking. He ran a hand through his hair and looked at Richie out of the corner of his eye. His tongue shot out briefly as he bit down on a smile, boyish and devastating. 

“I feel like we should do, sex first?” he said as he sat back on his heels.

“Do sex?”

“Yeah, Richard, you wanna do sex with me?”

“Seriously, what’s with the whole production?” Richie asked, “You know I’m easy. You could fuck me dry leaning over that ravine,” he said, waving a hand over the hill towards the cliff. “You could fuck me in a landfill, I’ll drop trou wherever.”

“Yeah, Trashmouth, your reputation precedes you,” Eddie joked, eyes crinkling.

“Mm-hm, babe, let me be your cum landfill.”

“Please, _babe_ , you’re worth more than that. You’re cum composting, at least.”

“My new branding,” said Richie, “Politically correct and environmentally conscious.”

“You don’t need branding.”

Richie put on his scullery maid Voice. “Oi, you’re the only person who can brand me, that roight, sir?” he said, high and throaty.

Eddie laughed, the kind that put his whole torso into play. He picked up one of Richie’s hands between both of his. “I have to tell you something,” he began. He brought the hand up to his mouth and gave the back of it a slow, quiet kiss. “You’re a complete original, Richie Tozier. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

Richie blushed. He tried to hide it, but he couldn’t hide the bashful duck of his head.

“I have another thing to tell you, too,” Eddie said. He held for a beat, until Richie raised back up to see him, sitting across from him so handsome and serious, boring his big cow eyes back into Richie’s own.

Then the one-liner. “I love you,” Eddie said.

“Oh,” said Richie again.

“Thank you for being patient,” Eddie added, meaning today, yesterday, a year, a decade. He was tracing letters with his thumbs into the forgiving rind of Richie’s wrist.

“It does feel nice saying it. I see why you like to.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, Richie. I love you.”

“Fuck,” Richie cursed. He put all the feeling he had behind the swear and then he scooped it right back up and filled his mouth with it again. “I love you, too,” he said.

“I know,” said Eddie.

“It’s not a Han Solo if you already said it.”

“I know.” 

“You are a relentless little bitch, you know that?”

“Yes,” said Eddie. He was smiling with his mouth half-open and his tongue stretching up towards a top left molar. “So can I eat you out?”

Richie rolled his eyes. “Oh, so you were just sweet-talking me to get in my pants?”

“I have permanent residence in your pants,” murmured Eddie, as he crawled to where Richie was seated. He bracketed his arms at Richie’s sides.

“Oh, you do?” said Richie, slanting to look down at him.

Eddie raised a hand to push his glasses up from where they were sliding down his nose. His face was very close. Richie could nearly taste his spearmint breath, the mouthwashing freak.

“Yeah, I’m taking out a second mortgage,” he said, before he used his teeth to tug at Richie’s ear. He licked over the shell to soothe it.

Richie put his hand over Eddie’s neck and cheek. He turned his face towards him so that he could connect their mouths, deep-sighing, spit-soaked, into the join.

When they broke for air, Eddie slapped at his inseam and said, “Hands and knees first. After that you can ride me.”

“Bossy.”

“Isn’t that what you pay me for?” Eddie said. He took off his pants. Richie scrambled to match him.

“You let me know if your knees start hurting, okay?”

“Let me know if _your_ knees start hurting, old man,” Richie huffed, as he settled into position. Eddie reached over for the extra blanket and laid it over his back. “I don’t want you to get too cold,” he said, pressing a kiss to Richie’s temple before retreating back.

At the center of Richie’s private terrain ran the cold wetness of the lube and the warm wetness of Eddie’s spit. The spongy map of Eddie’s tongue circled nimble and dedicated over his tenderloin split as the tips of his thumbs dipped sporadically into Richie’s hole. 

He had one hand spreading Richie’s cheeks apart and the other kneading and intermittently slapping Richie’s ass. He nipped and pinched at the meat of Richie’s thighs and then reached under to rub over the head of Richie’s leaking dick.

Eddie murmured something Richie couldn’t totally hear from the way they were situated. “Wet for me,” was the gist of it.

Richie did hear the click of the lube again, in the midst of their syncopated sighs. And then there were two fingers pulsing inside of him, the steady, ecstatic thrum. It went on like that. The squelchy lube sounds and Richie’s torn-out breaths. Sade still crooning out of Eddie’s shitty phone speaker, Eddie still kitten-licking around his taint. The heel of one hand pressing down into the small of Richie’s back. The crickets chirping around them chorused in agreement. They had the same idea, getting down and dirty in the secret silver hours of the night.

By the time Eddie fit in a third finger, Richie's chest had started to sink down.

“Ah, come here,” said Eddie. He extracted his fingers and tapped at Richie’s side to get him to flip. Richie hauled over, legs wobbly like a baby deer.

Eddie was sitting criss-cross applesauce. His dick stood up, thick and inviting. He was spreading lube over the girth of it. Richie could have written sonnets about Eddie’s cock. Some other time when he wasn’t so horned up. He composed a haiku in his head as he scooted over on his knees. It had something to do with the glans and a stalk. Maybe the word “ripeness.” He didn’t really have the brainpower right then to count out the syllables.

He was probably drooling. Eddie was watching him, eyes hooded and captive.

At last, Richie was mirroring their earlier position, except that he was the one kneeling over Eddie seated below him. Richie mirrored it some more by kissing him again. His tongue swiffering the inside of Eddie’s cheek and Eddie tucking flyaway locks of Richie’s mussed hair behind his ear.

Richie had thrown his arms over the vulnerable slope where Eddie’s head curved and became his neck. They moved closer with their eyes closed until Richie was half-over Eddie’s lap, hovering over his dick. 

“Hi honey, I’m home,” he said, giggling. He reached under himself to clutch at it. He tried to put it in drive, but the angle was off and he couldn’t see what he was doing, besides. It ended up dragging towards his balls in an errant, off-center line, though not before it caught for a moment on the bank of its target. Richie shuddered at the perimeter-bound sensation.

Eddie reached up and slapped him. The nice kind of slap, because Richie wanted to be slapped. It stung a little, in a good way, like scratching a mosquito bite or filling your mouth with pop rocks, sparking quick on your tongue. Sex as sensory overload, offering himself up into a jumble of parts and places for Eddie to grasp and grip and make him feel. Richie moaned and Eddie dropped down to place a kiss on the smarting part of his cheek.

And finally – _oh! –_ he was going for it. He had a hand wedged underneath Richie’s shoulder blades and the other clutching the wriggly flesh of his hip. Gathering him up in parts to fit them both together.

Eddie slid past the first ring of muscle so that the head of his dick was cradled by the reddened rim of Richie’s asshole. Reverse pig in a blanket. He wanted Eddie to shove in the whole hog. He said as much out loud, fast and high-pitched.

Eddie laughed, and the movement jostled the dick in question. It stuttered over the puckered landing strip stretch of Richie’s entrance — his _entrance!_ as if Eddie’s dick were a sex vampire he was inviting hospitably inside. Richie bore down to chase it.

“Are you okay? How’s your back?” Eddie asked.

“Mmm,” said Richie, “It’s good, you’re good, you’re so good to me.” He circled his hips minutely, patiently asking for more.

Eddie groaned. “Yeah, Richie,” he said, “I’m trying to be.” He pushed in slowly. It was the exact shape that Richie remembered, slotted in key-to-lock. “Oh,” Richie said, the same surprised exhalation that he’d made at the top of a cliff that day. Knowing that tens of thousands of iterations of his wide-eyed shock had passed over that exact spot had done little to lessen the sentiment of discovery. That he was allowed to feel that way, claiming the earth, claimed by the Earth, had brought him a certain clear-eyed awareness, settling over him like a veil of morning mist.

Richie sighed and relaxed the muscles at the backs of his thighs. The movement sunk him further down onto Eddie’s lap, speared onto Eddie’s cock. Eddie made a choked-out sound. He dug his nails into Richie’s waist.

“Careful,” Eddie murmured, “You need a good center of balance.”

Richie kissed him on the nose and locked his feet around Eddie’s back.

Eddie’s eyes widened. His eyebrows inverted up into sweet little curves. Richie leaned forward and kissed those too. Then Eddie was thrusting in, slow and even, matching the beat of the music.

It was difficult to kiss as he focused on the movement of their thighs. Both of them working it at the same time, Richie bearing down each time Eddie rose up. Richie was too tall so he had to buckle over to slip-slide their mouths against each other, sloppy and imprecise. Sectioned into the space from chin to philtrum, granting brief scrapes of teeth, tongue, lip. It was really just about sensation, at that point, the fuzzy feeling enveloping his figure-ground perception. It sent him off, priority mail. Signed, sealed, delivered, you’re mine and I’m yours.

“Eddie,” he mumbled into the part on his scalp, “You’re so deep in me.”

Inside him, and wasn’t that something. An itch he crossed deserts to scratch. “Railing me,” he sighed, and that was probably three syllables more than he could yet manage.

Eddie really was railing him, as much as he probably could from this angle. He hadn’t quite found Richie’s prostate yet, but it still felt good, to be taking their time like this. Richie’s ductile, fusible self, split open and cleaved into two halves: his and his. 

He could feel the full length of every stroke, building up momentum in his gut.

“Can I tip you over?”

Richie, a notorious idiot, attempted to moo in response. Eddie took the opportunity to slam his dick inside of him with extra vigor, so that it turned into a low moan. Eddie smirked and stole Richie’s earlier move, pecking him quickly on the tip of the nose. Then he pulled out, slow enough that Richie could really feel it. “Fuck,” he said. He let Eddie push gratuitously at his chest and shoulders until he was lying on his back and Eddie was entering him again. “Fuck,” he said again, with feeling.

“You’re so cute,” Eddie growled, as he pounded his cock into Richie. He’d found the prostate. Richie was the nail, Eddie the hammer.

“I’m not cute. I’m very - uh - masculine - uh,” Richie said. The punctuated grunts did not make for a very convincing argument.

“It’s not mutually exclusive,” said Eddie. 

“You’re cute,” he added, before he open-mouth tongued over Richie’s left nipple. “And you’re masculine,” he said, moving to the right one. “You’re any adjective you want,” he concluded, lifting his head to look Richie right in the eyes, before dropping down again and sucking a hickey right over Richie’s heart.

Eddie was moving faster and faster, snapping his hips against Richie’s raised thighs. He was saying some wild horny shit, in the deep husky pitch that he put on or that came out when he was really going for it. “Yeah, I wanna hear you, Rich,” he said. “You take me so well, baby, letting me fuck your tight ass raw, it feels so good when you fuck yourself on my dick.”

At what age had Eddie’s balls dropped? Richie was like 20% larger than him and yet he was the one who possessed a squeaky balloon-animal voice. 

Richie was lying on two layers of quilting and his back was probably chafing as it scraped across the ground. Eddie was pushing hot and thick into him with his hand over Richie’s stomach like he could feel it and Richie’s brain had gone completely fuzzed out with lust. Everything swirled with the sheer scope of Eddie’s long-lasting want, shocking and kaleidoscopic.

Eddie pulled out and Richie whined when the dry air rushed into the space where he’d left.

He thrust back in, slow, letting Richie feel the entire length of him. His torso trembled with the evidence of tightened self-control against Richie’s thighs.

It was situations like this that made Richie pop a boner whenever he saw something otherwise innocuous, like a bartender using a cocktail shaker, or a woman pumping the applicator into a tube of lip gloss. Things that shook or plunged, pretty much.

“C’mon Richie, do I feel good inside you? Can you come? Let me help you come,” Eddie was rambling as got a hand around Richie’s dick. Richie was overwhelmed and wailing for it at that point, so it was a good thing that they were outside. “Can you say it? Again?” he breathed out, registering little else but heat and closeness.

Eddie drove back in another time while he said, “Richie, I love you so fucking much,” and that’s what did it. _Thanks for your time, folks. I’ll be here all night._

Richie was still coming down when he heard Eddie groan his name and felt him pull out again. He had enough presence of mind to blink his eyes open and watch Eddie — beautiful, slim, sculpted, Richie’s hands molded over the mantel of his obliques — stroke himself to completion, coming in spurts over Richie’s crotch, some of it clingy dewy onto his wiry pubes, some of it rolling down his groin towards his ass.

“Rim shot,” he muttered, as Eddie levered his legs back down and petted at his calves.

“Ba-dum-tss,” Eddie agreed, slapping weakly at Richie’s upper chest like a drum kit before he face-planted into his torso. “I love you,” he continued, face smothered in Richie’s chest hair. “Did I say that already?” Richie gulped. He nodded. He stroked at the floppy strands on Eddie’s perfect scalp. Screw not needing to hear it. He wanted to be told over loudspeaker. Put an earpiece in and have Eddie feed him the same line at all hours of the day.

Eddie dragged his fingers down through Richie’s spunk, down between Richie’s legs where Eddie’s cum was splattered across his ass and thighs. Then he wiggled two into his fucked-out hole. Richie yelped, which turned into a groan as Eddie pushed their blended jizz shallowly into Richie’s ass. Like swirling a spoon into a cup of two-color Trix yogurt. Eddie was careful not to go too deep, so it was right on the edge of overstimulation.

Richie opened up and relaxed into it, letting Eddie give him what he wanted. He pushed up to kiss him, just as probing and slow, giving it in turn.

“Thank you,” Eddie said.

“What for?” Richie gasped out.

“For loving me back.”

* * *

Richie was leaning half-over the deck railing when Bill found him at sunset on the last day.

Ben had made baked ziti and caprese salad for dinner. Before they all sat down, Richie looked Eddie right in the eye, put on his best wink, dipped his voice low, and said, “Oh, I don’t know. I’m already full. I’m stuffed.”

He shook a little immediately after he said it. There was no wiggle room, no vagaries, not with those implications. He felt his spine bristle with spiky fear, the weight of whatever assumptions would be reined down on him next laying onto the lumbar. He was sure they could all read it on his face, how he was always pointed at Eddie as if he was the one asking, not the one telling.

Really, it wasn’t even a good enough joke to justify the risk. But he’d promised Eddie, and himself, and countless other people, including Mike and Ben and the barista at Peet’s Coffee, that he would try. If all that meant was turning the filter off and setting it to horny, he thought he still got brownie points. That got him so much closer than two decades worth of evasions and reversals, every time he’d gestured at the nearest woman at hand in a half-hearted attempt to sublimate his desires. Closer even than during the first six months of his new world order, when he’d been sure to word it somewhere around, “Yeah, Eddie lets me fuck him,” the subject-object differential loud and clear.

It was probably worth it for when Eddie had turned red and hid his face behind his glass of merlot.

It was possibly also worth it for when Bev had said, “I think you can take your boyfriend’s dick out of your ass for long enough to put _my_ boyfriend’s food in,” and Stan had replied, “You really have to respect the evolutionary process that made it so Richie could eat with something cleaner than his mouth.”

It was definitely worth it for when Eddie cornered him in the hallway an hour later, squeezed Richie’s ass, and said darkly into the back of his scalp, “This is _always_ mine, Rich.”

Definitely.

Richie was still thinking about it, the Hottest Couple superlative winners of suggested sex and light alcohol buzzing carelessly under his skin, when he heard the sliding glass doors shut behind him.

Bill appeared at his shoulder. He folded his arms over the railing to match Richie’s stance. “It’s really nice to see you happy,” he said.

It was a big blanket statement to make. Not _happy to be here_ or _happy to see us_. _Happy_ , point-blank. That was Bill, though. Bill talked in declaratives. Richie thought it was mostly bullshit, but he meant that with admiration.

Besides, Bill didn’t think he was bullshitting. That was just how he saw the world. With conviction.

Richie frowned. “Am I happy?”

“Yeah, I think you are,” said Bill. 

“How about you? How’s the - uh,” Richie wasn’t quite sure how to put it, so he just gesticulated wildly around himself, “The. Audra?”

Bill made a sound like a felled elephant and scrubbed a hand over his face.

“It’s difficult, you know? I like the idea of us more than I like _us_ ,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Richie. He picked at the label on his bottle of Sam Adams. He balled the sticker residue up between his thumb and forefinger and flung it out into the backyard.

“How’d you know? That it was still worth it?” Bill asked. Hollywood wunderkind Bill Denbrough himself, asking halfway-to-washed-up Richie Tozier for advice. And why not? He was settled now, when it came to matters of the heart. He had a lot that he could offer, to Bill, to anyone. He thought for a moment.

He said, “It’s worth it for as long as I want to do better. For as long as I want to try.”

Richie Tozier wasn’t a hero, or a villain. He was just some guy. He wanted to pay his bills. He wanted to do his job, which was the thing he loved and sometimes hated: Making people laugh. It was the nature of it that put him in the crosshairs of public scrutiny, and that meant responsibility, sure, but not much more than anyone else was ever tasked with — to lead a life guided by the imperative to care.

You couldn’t expect people to understand you totally or completely, and that wasn’t a bad thing, necessarily. It was enough, oftentimes, just to let them try. If they could see themselves reflected, even for just a second, no matter how murky or quick ran the river between the two of you, then perhaps that was something kind that you could offer the world.

That night, they dragged the extra deck chairs out onto the patio so that all eight of them could sit around the fire pit. Bev had her feet stretched out into Ben’s lap and Stan was perched on the arm of Patty’s chair, because he’d assigned himself to fire duty and so he kept getting up to thrust the fire poker uselessly into the center of the blaze. 

Richie was sitting on the wrought-iron bench next to Eddie. They weren’t touching, even though half of Richie’s senses were attuned to the fact that they could. He had a vice-grip on one armrest and one hand stuck sweaty in the gap.

Their friends were talking about something or other, the smudged sounds of mundane conversation — mortgages, residuals, early childhood development, Mike and Bill’s deeply derivative horror-comedy script (“ _Hamlet_ , with zombies!”) — drifting hazy into the amber night.

Richie was very lucky. He had been trying hard to remind himself of that, even though it went against a stand-up’s instinct to navel gaze. He let himself soak in the laughter — Patty’s brassy and full-bodied, Bev’s snorts, Bill’s scratchy from the bottom of his throat — and Richie felt very warmed, by the twinned tendrils of crackling fire and the bright pink emotion diffusing through his chest.

He looked again at Eddie next to him. In the firelight, his face flickered in and out of view, the left side of his nose outlined in a yellowing glow.

He said, “Hey, Eds,” and Eddie read the question plain on his face. He turned his palm up, offering.

Richie shifted close and bridged the gap.

He walked his fingers up the tender gangway of Eddie’s wrist. Then he carved one over the highest groove on his palm, following its tributary into the rift where it disappeared. Richie’s mother had done this to him as a kid, fancying herself an amateur palmist. Here is your heart line, here is your head line, here are the strings of fate that tie us together.

Eddie folded his fingers down, trapping Richie’s pointer into his calloused palm. He pulled lightly at it, and Richie slid the rest of his hand up so that their fingers were interlaced, yoking their love lines together.

This was what hands were made for. Holding, and beholding.

Richie Tozier holding Eddie Kaspbrak’s hand, surrounded by all the people they loved the most. 

Eddie stroked one finger along the bone-in part of Richie’s knuckles. Richie glanced sideways at him and tightened his grip.

They were all watching him or they weren’t watching him at all, but Eddie was looking back at him with his chin raised in question and his hard edges feathered soft, so Richie knew with clarity that it didn’t matter, either way. Only one thing mattered, and it was the only thing that ever really had. Just that: Eddie looking back at him. And Richie looking and looking, long enough to be seen.

I love you, said a boy, into the conch of his ear. Richie turned to the ocean — dark eyes, unplumbed depths, the roiling current of its beautiful mouth — and roared it back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sade's [Stronger Than Pride](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBYd2oW9o9I&list=PL-UWPlRIl68rznjyCvU4PbLtQLomZynXy)
> 
> If you saw me periodically come back to edit this, no you didn’t...  
> Thank you again for sticking with me! It's meant a lot - the first chapter of this was my first time writing fiction since probably middle school, and the finished product is definitely the longest thing I've ever written. So, all the lovely comments have been incredibly, immensely validating! I have cherished them like jewels. Thank you endlessly for reading!
> 
> content warnings:  
> \- the sex scene in this chapter includes slapping  
> \- richie makes misogynistic jokes near the beginning  
> \- this chapter continues to be mostly about internalized and externalized homophobia
> 
> (i am also on [twitter](https://twitter.com/reconvenings))


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